


Even If The Rain Falls

by Arakano



Category: PRISTIN (Band), Pledis Girlz (Band)
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2018-09-25 02:32:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 30,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9798575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arakano/pseuds/Arakano
Summary: 18. "Hey,"says Jieqiong, “I know it's gonna sound weird but can you just talk to me about anything right now?”Pristin/Pledis Girlz one shots. cross-posted on AFF.





	1. To Have To Hold

 To Have To Hold  
_Minkyung/Yebin_

* * *

 

The whispers start following them around the dining hall at breakfast but they really only notice at lunch. Yebin puts it down to Nayoung and Jieqiong and the last few episodes where they all got a little more screen time.

It is not until Dani full on stares at Minkyung for a few minutes, as if commiserating about something that she first feels like something might be wrong.

None of them have their phones on them so she cannot text Yewon and ask her to check the internet but then the PD comes up to their table.

“Minkyung,” she says, “a minute please.”

Yebin has no idea what this is about, and judging by the frowns on their faces, neither do any of the others, except for Minkyung who smiles, pushes her tray towards Yebin and rises from her seat.

“We'll catch you later,” Siyeon says, eyes narrowing just enough for anyone that knows her to notice and not enough for strangers to see through her eye smile.

Minkyung smirks but it does not reach her eyes.

Eunwoo pokes half heartedly at her plate.

* * *

A minute turns into several hours and they split up into their groups to rehearse but Minkyung has not returned.

It is not till after dinner that Siyeon appears with Minkyung, Eunwoo, and Kyungwon in tow.

“Go get Nayoung-unnie and Jieqiong,” Siyeon says and Yebin rushes off, not before she sees the telltale puffiness around the edges of Minkyung’s eyes.

Gathering the rest of the girls takes no time and they are gathered in one of the soundproof camera-less booths. It is a little cramped for seven but they can make do.

By now it is obvious that Minkyung has been crying. Yebin rests her head on Minkyung’s much taller shoulder and plays with the strands of her hair that dangle down.

“What happened,” Nayoung says.

“An article surfaced,” Siyeon scowls.

Minkyung inhales sharply and Yebin tries not to wince.

“It's about something I did when I was younger,” Minkyung whispers, plays with her fingers, looks up towards the light, tries to hide her face away but they can all see that she is trying desperately not to cry.

“I'm sorry,” she chokes out, rubs at her eyes, turns away.

Yebin has never seen Minkyung look defeated. Not when she was allocated into the F group, not even when Siyeon made her life a passive aggressive hell in the first few weeks of her time at Pledis.

“We're here for you,” Nayoung says.

Minkyung buries her face in her hands.

“You're still here,” Eunwoo says, “it's not over.”

“Nothing is over,” Kyungwon nods, and Yebin can tell that this is a discussion that they must have already had.

“You don't know that they'll kick you out for sure.”

Minkyung shakes her head.

“You're still here,” Nayoung says, “if they'd wanted to kick you out they would have.”

Jieqiong nods but Minkyung shakes her head again.

“I didn't spend a month hating you for you to be kicked out over something so stupid like this,” Siyeon snaps, “They wouldn't dare, not after how hard they worked to persuade me that you were a good addition.”

Yebin feels the blood drain from her face.

Pledis.

It's Pledis that they are talking about, not this silly show.

Pledis.

Minkyung thinks that Pledis is going to kick her out.

“They can't,” Eunwoo says.

“They can,” Minkyung whispers, “they can. People have been kicked for smaller things.”

Siyeon shakes her head, “People have been kicked because they don't want it enough.”

“It wouldn't be fair,” Minkyung says, “it wouldn't be fair to you all.”

Siyeon snorts, opens her mouth but Minkyung presses on, gulps, “you don't want something like me around.”

“Excuse you,” Siyeon says, “but you don't get to tell me what I want and what I don't want.”

Minkyung laughs and it is the first time today she has looked even fractionally like her usual self but a fog rests on her eyes and her smile is cold. Yebin has never seen this look before. It frightens her.

“You haven't seen the picture,” Minkyung says, “have you?”

Siyeon sniffs but does not reply.

“It doesn't matter really,” Eunwoo says, “not to us. We've been around you. We know you. We like you. We're not going to let a picture change that.”

“Maybe you won't,” Minkyung says, “but this is never going to go away. Things in the internet never go away. It's going to come back again and again and again. No company is going to want that. I wouldn't want that and I wouldn't want that to impact all of you.”

Yebin reaches out to rub her hands but Minkyung does not meet her halfway.

“I can't do that to all of you.”

She rounds on Siyeon and Jieqiong, “you've been training for almost 10 years. It wouldn't be fair to have this float around and be that one thing that people keep pointing out - look at one of them, she's a terrible person.”

“You're not a terrible person,” Jieqiong bursts out, “and if that's what you're worried about then all we need to do is be amazing enough that they won't care, right? Nobody digs up high school stories about SNSD-sunbaenim to try to discredit them.”

Yebin nods.

“Besides,” Kyungwon says, “at this point I, and probably the rest of us too, can't imagine debuting without you. It wouldn't be right.”

Minkyung looks stunned.

Nayoung reaches out a hand, gently rubs her shoulder, “It's ok. You have us, Minkyung-ah, we're not going anywhere.”

Yebin latches onto her arm, “you can't run away from us. We won't let you.”

Minkyung trembles.

“You're not making this easier,” she says, shakes her head, eyes steeling as she shakes the urge to cry out of her voice, “if the company wants me gone I'll have to go. You need to recognize that.”

Eunwoo shrugs, looks pointedly at Siyeon, “doesn't seem like the company wants you gone.”

“You don't know that,” Minkyung says, “you really don't.”

“And you really don't know that they want you gone either,” Kyungwon says, “you know that they can contact you if they want to.”

A knock on the door and they all turn to see one of the staff outside looking rather apologetic.

“Yes,” Minkyung says with a wry smile as she gets up and heads to the door, “they can contact me if they want to.”

“Come back,” Siyeon says and they can hear the slightest plea in her voice.

Minkyung averts her eyes, says nothing as the door closes behind her. Yebin leaps to her feet, presses her nose to the window and watches as Minkyung is lead down the hallway and around a corner, out of sight.

“Fuck,” Siyeon says, flings her hair tie to the floor, “fuckity fuck fuck.”

None of them have the heart to stop her.

Yebin thinks she is going to cry.

* * *

The minutes tick by and drag into an hour.

Kyungwon plays with the carpet, Eunwoo stares at her hands frowning, Jieqiong chews at the inside of her cheek, Siyeon is halfway through ripping her hair tie into tiny little pieces.

“We'll demand they let her back in,” Siyeon says.

Yebin looks away from the clock, sniffles.

“Yeah,” Siyeon says, “we'll make them bring her back.”

They have all known Siyeon for long enough to hear the lack of confidence in her voice.

“How,” Yebin says, “what can we do?”

Siyeon shrugs, “we could threaten to leave too.”

There is no force behind her statement. They all know they would not leave. There would be no guarantee they would be able to all make it somewhere else. Few companies would take this many trainees at once, fewer still would take trainees that had been kicked out and splitting up even further would defeat the entire purpose.

Nayoung frowns, “You know that won't do what you want it to do.”

Siyeon shrugs, “There will be something. There is always something. We can't let this end like this. She's worked so hard. We've all worked so hard. This can't be it.”

Nayoung shakes her head but does not say anything. None of them have seen whatever photo this is. Yebin does not want to begin speculating - it could be anything. They have known that Minkyung had been a little wilder than she presented, there was always a sparkle of something a little more beneath the playful teasing and masterful prods, but what this could be and why she would think it would be so bad is something that Yebin cannot place a finger on.

She does not know what she would do if Minkyung is kicked out, can barely stand to consider the thought because snuggling up to Minkyung, being laughed at and having someone to poke fun at Eunwoo and Jieqiong with has become so normal and expected that she cannot even begin to imagine what her life would be like if Minkyung were gone.

Gone.

She sniffles again. Jieqiong produces a tissue and Yebin blows her nose.

“We should go sleep,” Nayoung says, “we are going to need the rest - tomorrow's schedule is going to be busy for all of us.”

“How can you-” Siyeon starts but then bites down on her words, sighs, “you're right.”

This would be the perfect time for the door to open and Minkyung to poke her head in but it does not and instead the six of them filter out and head back to their respective rooms.

Yebin barely gets any sleep that night anyway.

* * *

Minkyung has been gone for a day now and Yebin knows she has just been going through the motions. Her team is trying not to point it out to her - she hears it in their whispers. They want to know where she has gone because by now word has reached everyone and as her team mates they are worried and shouldn't she know something if they're from the same company?

The Happyface girls have asked her if she knows what is going on but in all truth, whatever Yebin knows comes from others and both Pledis and Minkyung herself have not said anything at all.

Minkyung is just gone.

And their team is getting antsy.

Dajung, their leader, wants to choreograph the dance for four because life should move on if Minkyung does not come back.

Yebin refuses.

* * *

The next day, Jieqiong shakes her awake and Yebin groans.

“Minkyung came back last night,” she says and Yebin is immediately wide awake.

Jieqiong smiles, “get dressed.

Yebin throws on whatever clothing lies in a pile by her bed and leaps out after Jieqiong, “why didn't you wake me earlier?”

“Eunwoo just came by,” she says, gestures to her own red bunny pajama pants.

* * *

Yebin’s eyes dart around the dining hall.

Minkyung should not be this difficult to find. She is tall and gorgeous and obvious and it has never taken Yebin this long to spot her but then she sees Nayoung and Kyungwon in a corner and Siyeon trying to put someone in a headlock even though the cameras are probably running.

And even though the cameras are probably running, Yebin shrieks and flings herself at Minkyung, does not care that the others are watching.

“I was only gone two days,” Minkyung protests, laughs into Yebin’s shoulder.

“Two days too f-” a hand clamps over Siyeon’s mouth.

Yebin nods, ends up rubbing her cheek on Minkyung’s neck.

Minkyung laughs again and she thinks it is the most beautiful thing she has ever heard.

“I'm not leaving,” she whispers and Yebin bursts into tears.

* * *

A/N: Leave my babies alone. Comments feed my soul~


	2. That's Quite a Stretch

That's Quite a Stretch  
_Minkyung, Siyeon, Jieqiong, Kyungwon, Nayoung_

* * *

“You’re not very stretchy, are you?”

Jieqiong stops mid-stretch, base of her palm over her toes.

“Huh?”

Minkyung sidles into the room, plops herself down on the floor, looks critically at Jieqiong’s fingers, “that’s a bummer.”

“What’s a bummer?”

Minkyung grins, “You?”

“Yah!”

“No, but really though, you’re not that flexible.”

Jieqiong is thoroughly and utterly confused. She can reach back and grab her toe while standing. What in the world is Minkyung talking about?

“Ah,” Kyungwon says from the doorway, “yeah, I guess.”

Siyeon snickers, “she’s not going to win us first place. It doesn’t matter.”

“Win what?”

“ISAC,” Minkyung says, rolls her eyes, “where have you been for the past day? So many amazing pictures, so much drama - you can totally see who’s dating who by how they’re sitting.”

“Practicing,” Jieqiong says, reaches over and touches the toes on her other foot.

“Boo,” Kyungwon says.

Siyeon sighs, “She’s our only hope too.”

“Only hope?”

Minkyung flops backwards and lies on the training room floor, “Our only hope. And so useless. Look at this,” she gestures vaguely in the direction of Jieqiong, “we should have traded her in for another one while we still could.”

“What are you talking about?”

“ISAC has gymnastics,” Kyungwon says.

“Yes,” Jieqiong says.

“Gym-nas-tics,” Minkyung enunciates each syllable as if speaking to a child who has never heard the word before. Jieqiong is finding it rather hard to not be affronted but is preoccupied with being confused and being both affronted and confused at the same time is kind of difficult.

The three of them look expectantly at her.

“...ok? I know what gymnastics is.”

Minkyung rolls her eyes.

Siyeon sighs, “Which one of you dropped her on the head when she was a baby?”

Minkyung and Kyungwon both point at each other.

“You’re not that much older than me! And I was not dropped on the head as a baby!”

“Yes dear,” Minkyung smirks, “but sometimes we can’t tell.”

Jieqiong sputters.

“What does gymnastics have to do with me?”

The three turn to her at once. Siyeon snorts, Minkyung chokes back a snicker, Kyungwon just shakes her head slowly.

“It’s the unspoken rule.”

“Rule?”

“She’s. So. Slow,” Minkyung says, “you sure Nayoung didn’t break her while they were away?”

Jieqiong opens her mouth but Siyeon just speaks straight over her.

“Yes, the send-your-foreign-member-as-tribute rule.”

Jieqiong’s mouth stays open.

“Shh,” hisses Kyungwon, “that was supposed to be a secret.”

“Oops,” Siyeon says, twirls a strand of hair between her fingers and is entirely not-sorry.

“Well,” Minkyung shrugs, “Jieqiong’s like what, three quarters Korean at this point. There’s no harm in her knowing.”

“There’s a send-your-foreign-member-as-sacrifice rule?!”

“As tribute,” Minkyung says, “and it’s not so much a rule rule as an unspoken, kind of de facto thing people just do.”

“And before you say Kyla and Sungyeon are foreign too,” Siyeon wags a finger, “They’re both at least half Korean.”

“You just said I was three-quarters Korean,” Jieqiong splutters.

“Minkyung did,” Siyeon says.

Minkyung waves a hand, “details.”

Kyungwon is biting her lip and trying not to laugh.

“Wait,” Jieqiong says, “so you’re saying that you were considering sending me to compete in the gymnastics competition.”

“Not considering,” Minkyung says, “it was decided the moment you joined Pledis. You’re even Chinese. I’m not sure what you were expecting. Why else would we need you?”

“B-But I didn’t do gymnastics as a kid! I played and still play the pipa!”

“Details,” Siyeon says.

“R-Really?”

Jieqiong’s eyes flicker to Kyungwon who nods slowly and dramatically and does not feel even the slightest hint of remorse.

“And you’re not even as stretchy as Cheng Xiao.”

Siyeon shakes her head.

“No one is as stretchy as Cheng Xiao,” Minkyung says, “oh wait. Wasn’t Victoria pretty stretchy too? And they’re-”

“Can we stop using the word stretchy when we mean flexible? We’re supposed to be native speakers,” Kyungwon shrugs.

“Details,” Minkyung smirks before she turns back to Jieqiong, “Wait, Jieqiong, how are you so bad at being Chinese?”

“I-I I’m not!”

Minkyung’s grin only grows.

“Not Chinese?”

“Not bad at being Chinese,” Jieqiong snaps, “fuck you all.”

“Love you too babe,” Minkyung simpers.

Siyeon grins, Kyungwon giggles, Jieqiong growls.

* * *

Nayoung opens the door to the practice room to find Kyungwon standing between a snickering Minkyung and Jieqiong who is sitting in a corner, knees tucked to her chest, making soft growling noises, all while Siyeon prods at her cheek with an outstretched finger.

She has seen a lot in her tenure as leader of IOI but this she has not seen.

Minkyung sticks her tongue out.

Nayoung sighs.

“What is going on here?”

“We broke Jieqiong,” Siyeon says.

“Minkyung broke her,” Kyungwon says though her glare carries no heat.

Minkyung shrugs but looks slightly sorry, “we thought it would be funny to remind her that she’s going to be going up against Cheng Xiao next year at ISAC in gymnastics. And that she’s going to lose terribly.”

“She is?”

“She’s our only Chinese member,” Siyeon shrugs, “and have you seen how far Cheng Xiao can stretch?”

“Right,” says Nayoung.

The look Jieqiong shoots her is as if Nayoung just stabbed her in the back.

Minkyung’s snickering only grows louder.

* * *

A/N: I tried to write crack. Tried.


	3.  Of Cherry Tomatoes (and Lego Batman)

 Of Cherry Tomatoes (and Lego Batman)  
 _Minkyung/Kyungwon_

* * *

“So,” Minkyung says after Nayoung leaves the room in search of the little ones.

Kyungwon looks up from the last few bites of her salad, “Hm?”

“Do you have plans for tomorrow evening?”

Kyungwon frowns, scrunches up her nose, “Uh, we might have practice, I think?”

Minkyung rolls her eyes, “After practice.”

Kyungwon crunches on a leaf of lettuce, “Nothing in particular, I think? Oh wait. I might have something. ”

She scowls at something Minkyung cannot see from this angle but knows must be a tomato, “Why?”

Minkyung leans forward anyway and opens her mouth and sure enough a sliced cherry tomato is placed between her lips.

“Want to watch a movie with me?”

Kyungwon frowns, “We just watched 50 Shades Darker yesterday. You’re still obsessed with that song.”

“Yeah, but Lego Batman is out.”

Kyungwon waves her disposable fork in the air, jabs it in Minkyung’s direction, much like one would one of those wands from Harry Potter, “You're the one who didn't want to watch Lego Batman! I wanted to watch Lego Batman but noo, we ended up watching 50 Shades instead because someone wanted to watch a movie for adults. It wasn't even that great.”

Minkyung pouts.

“And besides,” Kyungwon says, “since you didn't want to watch Lego Batman, I've already asked Jieqiong and we're going tomorrow.”

“You what?”

“I asked Jieqiong,” Kyungwon says triumphantly, “and she said yes.”

“You asked Jieqiong,” Minkyung says.

“Yup,” Kyungwon spears the last leaf of lettuce.

“And she said yes.”

The fork stops halfway to Kyungwon’s mouth, “...uh huh? Didn't I just say that?”

“To a movie tomorrow night.”

Kyungwon’s eyes twinkle, as she munches on the leaf, “Yup.”

“Pft,” Minkyung says, “Liar.”

“W-What?” Kyungwon splutters, “I'm not lying!”

“There's no way you and Jieqiong are going out by yourselves at night to a movie on Valentine's Day.”

Kyungwon frowns, genuinely puzzled, “Why not?”

Minkyung blinks, “Wait, hang on, really?”

“Yeah. We even bought tickets.”

Kyungwon pats her coat pocket with the hand that is not holding on to the disposable salad fork.

“...you bought tickets.”

“Uh huh.”

“The two of you.”

“...yes?”

“Valentine's Day. Lego Batman.”

“Hang on,” says Kyungwon, “where is this going?”

“Nowhere, clearly,” Minkyung says, rolls her eyes, huffs.

“Aw,” Kyungwon grins, “Is somebody going to be lonely tomorrow evening?”

“No,” says Minkyung, sniffs, “I'm going to go hang out with Nayoung-unnie.”

“Ok,” Kyungwon says, scrapes the bottom of the disposable box with her fork then licks the slightest bit of dressing of of it, “That's good then.”

“T-That’s good?”

“Mmhm,” Kyungwon says, “it's good that you two will get time to hang out. You really missed Nayoung-unnie when she was away and you didn't get to be in the same room as her so this'll be good."

Sometimes, Minkyung does not know why she even bothers.

She sighs.

Kyungwon’s attention floats back to her own laptop screen. Strands of her short blond hair peek out from under her cap. Kyungwon has not stopped gloating about how quickly her hair dries nowadays. Minkyung has other problems with Kyungwon’s short hair, none of which involve how quickly it dries.

“Kang Kyungwon,” Minkyung says.

Kyungwon grins, wiggles her eyebrows, “You mean Yuha?”

Minkyung glares at her.

Kyungwon giggles.

“Yes, Roa?”

Kyungwon rolls the ‘R’, grins.

Minkyung tries valiantly not to feel embarrassed but can definitely feel her cheeks warming up.

“What? What is it?” Kyungwon frowns.

Minkyung catches a glimpse of the time on her laptop. Oh crap. Nayoung is going to be wrapping up the Vlive soon so they are going to have to hurry if they want to say their greetings.

“Last one to the dance practice room loses!”

She scrambles out of her chair for the door as she finishes her sentence.

“H-Hey! That's cheating! Cheating, Minkyung! Cheater!”

 

* * *

 

“Hey,” Minkyung sidles up to Jieqiong.

Jieqiong smiles from behind a spoonful of cereal, “Hey.”

“You're watching Lego Batman with Kyungwon tomorrow?”

“Yup,” Jieqiong says, slurps at the milk, “Wanna come with?”

Minkyung blinks.

“Don't you guys already have tickets?”

Jieqiong shrugs, “Yeah, so?”

“I don't really want to sit with a couple of random people,” Minkyung mutters.

Jieqiong’s eyes twinkle and Minkyung is reminded that it is remarkably easy to just think of Jieqiong as not particularly bright because she rarely puts in the effort to properly apply herself, but it is also true that Jieqiong has been around Siyeon for a very long time and some things rub off really quickly.

Then Jieqiong smirks, “What's your best offer?”

Minkyung sighs, drags a chair out and sits down, puts her elbows on the table, rests her chin, “What do you want this time?”

Jieqiong tells her and Minkyung decides she is really going to have to make Kang Kyungwon pay.

After she figures out how to get both Yebin and Yewon out of that room for the entirety of tomorrow evening, that is.

(She doesn't even know how that is going to help because Jieqiong still barely talks to Nayoung, always clinging to Eunwoo or Siyeon and being beaten to the punch by Yebin anyway. Alright, fine, so perhaps getting Yebin away for the evening will help.)

 

* * *

 

“What are you doing here?”

Minkyung grins at the frown on Kyungwon’s face.

“You can't kill our most popular member. We kind of need her.”

“For now,” Minkyung says.

Kyungwon shrugs, “For a while, yeah.”

Minkyung hums in agreement, rocks gently back and forth on the balls of her feet. They are just outside the cinema, face masks and caps and all. It is eleven and there is definitely no crowd for Lego Batman at this time - she is quite surprised that there is even a showing at this time for a kid’s show. As much as Kyungwon tried to persuade her the other time, how can a film about Batman made with Lego bricks, be anything but a kid’s show?

“No, but seriously though,” Kyungwon frowns, “You didn't just like, knock her out in some dark alley and leave her there, did you?”

Minkyung rolls her eyes, “What have you been reading lately? Who do you think I am?”

“That's precisely why I'm asking,” Kyungwon says, wiggles her eyebrows.

Minkyung scowls, whacks her gently on the shoulder, “Heyy.”

“She's back at the dorm then?”

Minkyung sighs, “If I'd known you'd be this interested in her, I'd have dragged her here. She's fine. She's at the dorm. Not sure what she's doing. Probably trying to work up the courage to talk to Nayoung-unnie.”

Kyungwon smiles, “OK then. Let's go.”

“OK? That's it? Just OK?”

Kyungwon nods, “Yeah, why? You don't want to watch it with me?”

“No, what on earth are you talking about?”

Kyungwon grins, “OK.”

“Hey,” Minkyung pouts, “it wasn't easy getting both Yebin and Yewon out of the house, you know? You should appreciate the amount of work I had to do!”

Kyungwon laughs, grabs her hand, and tugs her towards the popcorn.

Minkyung laughs too.

* * *

A/N: Happy Valentine's~ Here's a short piece. Kind of forgot Valentine's was a thing. :P


	4. Two Freshmen and a Tree

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I can't believe you thought this was a good idea,” snickers Minkyung from the base of the not-very-tall tree. Kyungwon is too busy clinging onto the branch she is seated on for dear life to properly respond.

“Minkyung man.”

“Yes, Kyungwon man?”

“Why are you trying to hide behind me?”

Minkyung mumbles something into Kyungwon's shoulder.

“You what?”

“Making friends is scary.”

Kyungwon snorts, shrugs Minkyung off her to a highly affronted ‘Heyy!’ and strides down the corridor as fast as her long legs take her. Which is pretty damn fast for someone with the longest legs in the team. Yes they measured.

“W-Wait for meeee~”

Kyungwon does not stop until she hears an “Oh my God I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, I'm really sorry” that sounds suspiciously like Minkyung. 

She turns and sees Minkyung bowing in apology to some guy who, on second glance, is most certainly Minkyung’s type. Tall - taller than Minkyung, dark and handsome with a jawline that you can cut yourself on, oh she can feel Minkyung’s anxiety from this end of the corridor. Minkyung’s fingers twitch in the way that say  _ help me  _ but Kyungwon does not think she needs very much help at all. No one hits on two freshmen at once, right? Looks like there's nothing for her to do here but make her escape.

So Kyungwon winks at Minkyung and saunters off, not before carving Minkyung’s look of betrayal into her memory - serves her right for letting Siyeon into their snacks. Hmph. 

* * *

Kyungwon forgets that they have practice that afternoon - well, she forgets it for as long as she does not see Minkyung, which is about three hours worth of various different classes. Then a decidedly annoyed Minkyung appears before her, grabs her elbow and drags her to the cafeteria without saying a word.

Kyungwon would much rather go find a cafe somewhere outside but it is true that their next class is in half an hour and the cafeteria is just average, not terrible. 

She slurps her soup a little more loudly than usual on purpose when Minkyung plops her tray down opposite her but does not say anything. 

Minkyung glares at her. 

Kyungwon grins. 

“So what's his name?”

The glare disappears to be instantly replaced with a look of confusion.

“His name?”

“Yeah,” Kyungwon scoops a cherry tomato onto Minkyung’s plate, “y’know, tall, dark, good looking that you bumped into in the corridor this morning?”

Minkyung’s eyes narrow, “Oh, you mean the asshole you left me to deal with on my own?”

Kyungwon cringes a little into her spoon of rice, “Well, he looked like he was your type.”

Minkyung chokes on her soup.

“My type?!”

Kyungwon nods, puts her spoon down, checks off on her fingers, “Taller than you, nice sweater, amazing jaw, looked like he might have a nice smile too.”

Minkyung throws a clean chopstick at Kyungwon.

“He. Was. An. Asshole. And. You. Ditched. Me.”

Kyungwon giggles, having caught the chopstick in her hands, shrugs, “How was I supposed to know he was an asshole?”

“By staying and hearing our conversation?”

“Ah,” she waggles a finger, “but then there's no way he would have asked you out.”

Minkyung’s jaw does not look like it can drop any further, which Kyungwon thinks is an adorable look on her - should keep that up more to be asked out!

“Which part of he was an asshole do you not get?”

“I get it, I get it, sheesh. Was just trying to help you out there.”

“Then don't leave me,” Minkyung sulks into her meal.

Kyungwon laughs.

“Now give my chopstick back.”

“You gave it to me.”

“I threw it at you. There's a difference.”

“Well, I have it now so there's no difference.”

“Kang Kyungwon.”

“Yes, Kim Minkyung?” Kyungwon's grin reaches her ears as she dangles the chopstick between two fingers.

“Give it back.”

“Nuh uh. Say please.”

Minkyung sighs, “May I please have my chopstick?”

“Do you, Kim Minkyung, promise to not throw chopsticks at one Kang Kyungwon?”

Minkyung scowls.

“I'm just going to go get another set,” she pushes her chair back. 

Kyungwon grabs her wrist and hurriedly presses the chopstick into her hand, “OK, OK, you can have it.”

Minkyung sighs and rolls her eyes but she sits back down with an adorable huff. 

Kyungwon grins.

* * *

“Minkyung,” Kyungwon nudges her with the cap of her pen.

Minkyung holds out a hand, mutters something under her breath.

“One moment.”

“‘Kay,” Kyungwon looks back down at her homework - she’s never disliked math, but she's never liked it either, so putting in the effort to do well in it always took so much work. 

Not Minkyung though.

Minkyung actually doesn't mind school and math, Kyungwon knows, which is why they're both taking this statistics course instead of more fun stuff like art of postmodern Japan. Or 80s Jazz.

Ooh, there's a cat in the tree opposite the cafe. If pressed, Kyungwon would say that she were a dog person simply because of Kong-ie but cats are adorable as well. This one has white socks on its black fur and that is literally the cutest thing she has seen all day. Oh, maybe she should wear her Kumamon socks tomorrow. That cat is not a bear but it's black and white too.

“-to Kyungwon.”

A nudge to her arm.

“Yes?”

Minkyung stares at her expectantly.

“Oh right. Yeah. This.”

Kyungwon jabs at the problem set, “I don't get what they're trying to ask.”

Minkyung tilts her head and attempts to read the question upside down. Kyungwon rotates the paper away and watches Minkyung’s eyes flick up with a tinge of annoyance. 

Kyungwon grins.

Minkyung sighs. 

“Do you want me to help you or not?”

Kyungwon shrugs, “There's a really cute cat in the tree across the road.”

Minkyung’s eyebrows shoot upwards.

“Where?”

* * *

“I can't believe you thought this was a good idea,” snickers Minkyung from the base of the not-very-tall tree.

Kyungwon is too busy clinging onto the branch she is seated on for dear life to properly respond.

The cat has long since run off into the bushes across the street somewhere so that worked out nicely. Not. 

“You got up there, you can come back down.”

Kyungwon shakes her head at the laughter in Minkyung’s voice.

“C’mon. We haven't got all day.”

“Well we actually don't have to be anywhere till tomorrow so we do have all day.”

Minkyung raises her eyebrows.

Kyungwon glares defiantly back. The tree branch looks higher above the ground than she thought it was when she first clambered onto it and there's no way she's going to risk jumping and breaking an ankle or two. It took Siyeon almost an entire year to get better - she does not have an entire year to wait.

Minkyung sighs then shuffles under the tree and holds her arms out expectantly.

“...What are you doing?”

Minkyung smirks, “Come to mama.”

“Aw hell no.”

“I'll be fine. I can catch you.”

“I don't trust you.”

“Y-You don't trust me?!”

Kyungwon shrugs, “You don't think it's high so you're just going to move away at the last second and then I'm going to break an ankle so no, I don't trust you.”

Minkyung glares at her but says nothing.

“See?” Kyungwon releases one hand from the tree branch and waggles a finger, “I knew it-woah!”

Minkyung shrieks.

Kyungwon falls out of the tree onto Minkyung who does not move out of the way. 

* * *

“Do I want to hear the explanation?” Nayoung frowns.

Kyungwon hides behind Minkyung.

“Not particularly, nope,” Minkyung grins, pats Kyungwon's head with the hand without the large One Piece band-aid. 

Nayoung deflates a little.

“Can you please try not to get hurt in future?”

Minkyung clutches her heart melodramatically, “I always try.”

Kyungwon smacks her on the head.

“Is this how you treat your savior?”

Kyungwon sticks her tongue out, “In hindsight you were right, it wasn't that far from the ground.”

“Kang. Kyung. Won. You did not just-”

Nayoung sighs.

Siyeon pokes her head into the room, “Did someone say injury?”

“No!”

Nayoung sighs again.


	5. Found You

Found You  
_Nayoung/Jieqiong_

* * *

A hand on her is not nearly enough to wake Nayoung up - all the girls know this, so it comes as a surprise to Nayoung herself when her eyes crack open in the middle of the night to a patch of warmth on her shoulder just resting there.

Her eyes flick up in the darkness to find the silhouette of Jieqiong’s face as the younger girl sits by her bed, a single hand on Nayoung’s shoulder.

All the other girls sleep deeply so she does not have to be quiet but she lowers her voice anyway, “Is something wrong?”

Jieqiong’s fingers were trembling slightly, Nayoung notes, though they still as Jieqiong shakes her head.

“Are you alright?”

Jieqiong nods rapidly, so rapidly that even groggy half-asleep Nayoung can see the lie. She props herself up on an elbow, reaches over and ruffles Jieqiong’s hair, pats her gently on the head.

Jieqiong’s head bows, her hair falls across her face and Nayoung can no longer even make out her features but that hand is still on her shoulder.

Something is definitely wrong and no matter how hard Nayoung thinks about the schedule they had the day before, nothing comes to mind. They had been up for many hours the previous day but all things considered everything had been alright. The fanchants had been great and the filming had gone well.

“Hey,” she says, sitting up, “I’m going to get some water.”

Jieqiong nods, slowly moves her hand down from Nayoung’s shoulder to her wrist then further down, letting Nayoung lace their fingers together to tug her out the room.

* * *

Nayoung slides the kitchen door shut behind them, flicks the lights on, dispenses herself a cup of water from the fridge all with her one free hand as Jieqiong makes no move to let go, letting herself be dragged around the kitchen.

“What happened?”

Jieqiong’s mouth twitches, she grimaces, her grip tightens on Nayoung’s hand.

“I had a dream,” she says.

Nayoung gently squeezes her hand, rubs small circles with her thumb.

“It’s dumb,” Jieqiong laughs softly, looks up to the ceiling, rubs her eyes with her free hand, “it was a dumb dream but I couldn’t find you.”

Nayoung takes in a deep breath.

* * *

It is 2012 and they are kids and Yejin-unnie has just debuted earlier that year so everyone has spent most of the summer practicing with a renewed sense of purpose.

Jieqiong smiles and waves at her from across the room.

Nayoung nods and Jieqiong’s smile widens.

There are a few new younger trainees as well whose names she learns briefly but who only really make Nayoung more nervous. The likelihood of her managing to debut with After School is growing more remote with every passing month - she knows she needs to get a lot better at performing than she is right now and the fact that Pledis is recruiting all these younger girls (and Junghyun who is twelve and practically a baby) can only mean that they want a younger group but Nayoung is five whole years on Junghyun and that might be stretching it.

She takes her frustrations out in dance practice, forces her body to snap to the movements, moves to the waves, dips her knee in then out, watches as tiny tiny Junghyun hits the moves with ease to her left, watches as Jieqiong inexplicably struggles.

Nayoung usually focuses more on her own movements but Pledis has been trying something out recently that involves groups. Again, whether that has anything to do with After School or not, Nayoung has no idea, but she knows they take notes at every evaluation and everything means something as a trainee.

The three of them have been grouped up for Genie this week, Nayoung, Junghyun and Jieqiong, that one Chinese trainee who is still learning Korean, is here during the summer, gets along well with Junghyun, always says “Hello, unnie” in the brightest tone, and beams at her.

The dance instructor frowns at them in the mirror as they turn off the music when Jieqiong only barely lifts her left leg for the kicks.

“Kyulkyung,” the instructor says.

Nayoung waits, knows that Jieqiong still sometimes takes a while to recognize her Korean name, then gently taps her on the shoulder.

Jieqiong whirls around, “Yes! Sorry!”

“Kyulkyung,” the instructor says again, “are you trying?”

Nayoung gets the full force of Jieqiong’s confused, sheepish, embarrassed look. The instructor just sighs and turns to Nayoung instead, “Can you make this work?”

Nayoung nods.

Jieqiong beams at her.

* * *

Sure enough, Nayoung knows she is going to regret this when it is two hours into practice and they have all the other moves down except for the fact that Jieqiong somehow cannot seem to do the kick with her left leg.

She does not get it.

She knows Jieqiong understands right and left, knows that Jieqiong can dance even if she is still awkward limbs, can at the very least copy what she and Junghyun are doing in front of the mirrors since the rest of the dance is perfectly fine.

“Is there a,” she gestures to her own kicking leg, “problem?”

Jieqiong’s mouth is set in a thin line but she frowns and shakes her head.

Junghyun frowns at her, “Then just kick already. You can do it.”

“H-Hurts.”

Jieqiong points at a spot by her left knee.

Nayoung frowns.

“We haven’t done nearly enough practice for you to be getting muscle aches,” the words come out before she realizes that saying this much is pointless.

She sighs.

“Just do it later during the evaluation, alright?”

Jieqiong nods rapidly and her eyes look a little brighter. Junghyun rolls her eyes in the background but she is eleven and that just makes her adorable instead of insufferable.

* * *

Nayoung should really have known better when they are stopped three seconds after the second kicking portion of the choreography.

“Kyulkyung,” the instructor says to the room full of trainees, “go stand in the back.”

Nayoung watches as she bows her head and shuffles off to the back of the room.

Junghyun and her complete the rest of their performance without any issues, the instructor nodding at them.

“Nayoung,” she says, clarifies, “Im Nayoung, I'd like to talk to you later as well.”

Nayoung nods.

* * *

Nayoung cannot hear what the instructor is saying to the other trainee but their body language speaks volumes. She has not been at Pledis for that long but there have always been rumors that they would kick people out for not wanting it enough - and while Jieqiong is literally in a foreign land, this past practice session does not help.

Jieqiong is still folded in a corner, head hanging over her knees. Nayoung feels a little bad for her but at the same time she does not quite understand.

Clearly neither does the frustrated instructor.

“Does she just not get it? Does she even understand what I told her?”

Nayoung stays quiet.

“Nayoung, can you please try and get her to get this right? The CEO is coming to next week's evaluation so she either needs to get it right or not perform at all.”

“I can try,” Nayoung says with confidence she does not have.

* * *

“Like this,” she does the kick facing the mirror.

Jieqiong nods, lips pursed in determination - what sort of determination Nayoung does not know because while this move requires some semblance of balance, the kicking is not inherently complicated.

Jieqiong kicks with her left leg but it does not go up quite high enough.

Nayoung frowns.

“Higher,” she says.

Jieqiong nods again, takes in a deep breath and does another kick. This time it gets closer but is not quite good enough.

“More,” Nayoung says, does another kick of her own to show that the foot should go up about to the other knee.

Jieqiong tries it but her foot just does not go any higher than her calf.

Nayoung's frown deepens.

“Harder,” she says, “just put more into it.”

Jieqiong seems almost as if she is catching her breath, then she kicks once more with enough force, her foot makes it up there but a whimper also escapes.

“That was good,” Nayoung says, “Do it again?”

It does seem a little strange that someone who can dance in all other ways would be so strangely inflexible in just this one move but flexibility is best developed by pushing through the ache so Nayoung has her do it at least three more times.

“It hurts,” Jieqiong says quietly after the fourth kick, tears in her eyes.

“Becoming more flexible hurts,” Nayoung smiles sadly, “there's no way around it.”

Jieqiong frowns and shakes her head, shakes a tear free and rubs it away.

“It's different.”

“Let's do it ten more times,” Nayoung says.

Jieqiong chews down on her bottom lip, wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and nods.

The look in her eyes is one of trust, trust that Nayoung is not sure she deserves.

* * *

Jieqiong is not at practice the next day, nor the one after and a week passes without her hearing anyone greet her with a bright “Hello, unnie.” The evaluation with the CEO passes uneventfully and no one mentions that Nayoung and Junghyun were supposed to have third group mate, someone in the middle.

At first Nayoung is inexplicably annoyed, annoyed that something this small like the damn Genie kick would cause her to give up. They'd practiced Bang the week before, for heaven's sake, which was way more intense albeit with less kicking.

Junghyun even glares at her once when they pass in the corridors which is the strangest.

Then she starts to hear whispers, realizes that the instructor who had demanded they get this right seems to be coming around less often and her mind starts to wander.

Was she too harsh? Too strict? Had she been too difficult?

It is five days later that her annoyance slowly melts away into guilt and worry and Nayoung realizes that it is very possible that fourteen year old Zhou Jieqiong might have left her life entirely, that she knows nothing about how to find her because all she knows is Shanghai and millions of people life in Shanghai.

The realization leaves her strangely hollow on the inside. It is strange, how over such a short period of time she had grown used to that one voice saying the simplest greeting, that smile.

She keeps turning corners in the building hoping that she will be greeted with the same “Hello, unnie” but only air meets her and she cannot find those eyes and that smile.

This is the longest summer of her life.

* * *

The school year comes and goes, Nayoung busies herself with getting used to her still growing limbs, making their new gangly lengths do the things she wants them to do, has her moves look the way she needs them to.

Junghyun gets a little taller and even less afraid of authority, they get more new trainees, loud and confident ones, shy meek ones, none of which greet her brightly in the corridor.

Then summer rolls around and Nayoung does not know why she cares this much but her heartbeat pounds in her ears as she steps into the building for the first full day summer practice.

Junghyun waves but no one beams and says “Hello, unnie” and Nayoung most decidedly does not keep herself from crying that evening, no she does not.

* * *

Three days into particularly grueling practice and three whole weeks into summer - both the boys and girls are doing the same song just this one time and everyone, even Seungcheol is struggling.

The door to the practice room opens by a thin sliver, then Junghyun shrieks and runs to it, pounces on someone.

When they disentangle themselves, Nayoung is greeted by the brightest “Hello, unnie!” she has heard in a year.

She ducks her head to hide her own smile, not before finding eyes that beam at her.

* * *

Jieqiong approaches her later as they are packing up to head home, abruptly stops and bows.

“Sorry!”

“...Huh?”

“I didn’t get to say bye when I left,” she grins sheepishly up at Nayoung, “and I never got your number so I couldn't say anything.”

Nayoung’s brain is still not caught up to what is going on because she should be doing the apologizing instead of being apologized to so she continues staring blankly at Jieqiong.

Jieqiong looks expectantly at her then laughs, “Unnie, you haven’t changed, have you?”

Nayoung tilts her head slightly, looks at Jieqiong who is now taller, just that little bit thinner (not that she was not already skinny before).

“Have you?”

Jieqiong laughs, sticks her tongue out.

* * *

The weather gets progressively warmer to the point where even the skinniest guys have stopped wearing pants.

Nayoung herself has been in shorts for three weeks now, sits cross-legged on the floor with a pile of napkins waiting for Junghyun and Jieqiong to come back from their convenience store run. She hopes they don't forget the drinks for some of the guys, knows that they will come back with some form of ice cream and with ice cream comes a mess since they both eat properly but Junghyun has the tendency to drop things when excited and Jieqiong was never the most meticulous person.

Giggles outside the door, a loud “Ya!” and then the two of them are elbowing each other and running into the room carrying plastic bags that come crashing down into the floor with a little too much force.

Junghyun laughs at the look of surprise on Nayoung's face. Nayoung is preoccupied with making sure that nothing spilled inside the bags but Jieqiong bats her hands away.

“Later,” she laughs and holds out a half-finished drink bottle.

“Later?”

“She means the snacks are for later,” Junghyun says, plops down to the floor next to Nayoung and rests her head on Nayoung's shoulder.

Jieqiong nods, repeats,“The snacks are for later. Drink this now.”

Nayoung takes the bottle, takes a sip of the chilled tea.

“You didn't buy ice cream? I'm surprised.”

The two girls exchange looks.

“Hmph,” says Jieqiong who scoots closer to Nayoung.

Junghyun rolls her eyes, “We're going to be idols one day. We can't just buy ice cream whenever we want.”

Nayoung shrugs, “Don't think anyone tells Yejin-unnie she can't have ice cream.”

“Yejin-unnie is special,” Junghyun sticks her tongue out.

“Junghyun likes ice cream,” Jieqiong says, grins.

Junghyun leans over and smacks her hard on the knee before turning white.

“Oh my God I'm so sorry, Jieqiong!”

Jieqiong blinks, looks down at her own knee, then back up, and laughs, shaking her head.

Nayoung does not know how she has never seen it before but a large crescent-shaped scar is carved across the inside of her left knee.

It clicks and her heart feels like it stops for a moment.

…did she…

Was that…

Was that scar her doing?

From last year?

Suddenly that one Genie practice session comes back to her and Nayoung does not know what to do with herself.

She did that didn't she?

She did that by making her practice. She should have known. Should have been able to figure it out. Should have listened when Jieqiong said it was different instead of brushing her off.

Oh God.

Her blood runs cold and Jieqiong reads her face entirely wrongly, beams between sips of tea, “Don't worry, it doesn't hurt anymore, unnie! The doctors took it all out so it's all good now! Look, I can do the kick now, no problem.”

Nayoung blanches when Jieqiong stands up, puts her hands on her hips and perfectly recreates the chorus of the Genie dance before her eyes.

 _Stop_ , she wants to say but all she can manage is to sit there horrified.

“Unnie,” Jieqiong frowns at her, “surely that wasn't that bad.”

“Earth to Nayoung-unnie,” Junghyun elbows her in the side.

“Unnie, are you alright?” Jieqiong’s concern is palpable as she squats back down next to Nayoung and the scar comes cleanly into view and Nayoung feels like she is going to throw up.

“Ah,” she says instead, nods.

* * *

She finds Jieqiong the next day after practice, armed with a Chinese to Korean dictionary she bought on her way to the company building just in case.

“Hey,” she taps Jieqiong in the shoulder as they are about to leave the room, “can I talk to you?”

Jieqiong looks confused, “We're talking?”

Nayoung cannot hide the small smile that crosses her face, “Yes.”

“Ok,” Jieqiong finishes putting her things into her bag then turns around and beams at her.

“I'm really sorry,” Nayoung says.

Jieqiong’s head cocks to a side and she blinks owlishly.

“Your knee,” she says, “I'm sorry that I made it worse. I should have-”

Jieqiong shakes her head vehemently, “No, no.”

Jieqiong’s lips twist in frustration and Nayoung knows there are words that want to emerge that she will not understand.

She holds out the dictionary.

Jieqiong takes it instead of laughing like she usually would, flips through it with the familiarity of a pro and points at the word fault then at herself, chews the word in her mouth and sounds it out.

“It was my… fault, not you.”

She nods, eyes flashing with determination, “Don't be sorry.”

“But I-”

“No but. No. Me. Not you. I had it before. I should have said something.”

Nayoung feels her veins unfreeze, feels herself deflate. Then Jieqiong’s face softens, she peers closer at Nayoung, comes to a realization, eyes widened in concern.

“Did you… worry?”

Nayoung shakes her head, then nods, then shakes it again.

“I'm sorry,” Jieqiong says, “I-”

“I couldn’t find you,” Nayoung blurts out.

Jieqiong hugs her, voice muffled in her shoulder

“I’m right here.”

* * *

It is 2017 and they are Pristin and Nayoung sits at the kitchen in the middle of night, holds Zhou Jieqiong’s hand in hers after a nightmare.

“I’m right here.”


	6. To Cross Oceans For

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It seems obvious enough, so obvious that she wonders why she has never seriously thought about this before - sure, they had always stuck to Korean while communicating with Jieqiong to make sure that she picked the language up quickly, but now that she’s basically fluent, it makes sense.

  _To Cross Oceans For_

* * *

“You take her,” Yebin says.

“Nah,” Junghyun frowns, “you take her. I’m not as interested in the movie. I’ll go another time. You are. You wanna watch it now. She wants to go to a movie. You should just take her.”

“B-But she’s never watched...”

Junghyun raises an eyebrow and even though she is several notable inches shorter than Yebin, the older girl sighs, “Fine.”

“I’ll come along,” Nayoung says, knows fully why Yebin is hesitant to go to the movies alone with Jieqiong.

Yebin loves teaching Jieqiong new words but Yebin is also the biggest Harry Potter fan that Nayoung has met in her entire life and she’s sure that watching the last of the Harry Potter movies while having to answer questions of “what’s going on” or explaining the entire series to someone who has no knowledge of the magical world is not Yebin’s idea of a good time.

She can probably get them into another movie that would be easier to explain. Like Transformers or something. Big robots fighting other big things. Pretty straightforward, right?

Yebin lights up, squeals, grabs onto Nayoung’s elbow, “Nayoung-unnie’s the best!”

Jieqiong smiles at her.

* * *

“Ok, see you after!” Yebin beams then bounces off in the direction of another hall.

Jieqiong cocks her head to the side, “Where is she going?”

“Oh,” Nayoung says, “we’re going to watch another movie that’s not Harry Potter.”

Jieqiong frowns lightly.

Nayoung pats her on the shoulder, “It’s ok, I heard this one has a lot of action. It should be easier for you to understand.”

“Oh,” Jieqiong says.

Nayoung feels the slightest bit guilty but shoves it to the bottom of her heart and does not think about it.

* * *

The sofa sinks down next to Nayoung.

She nods at Jieqiong who proceeds to steal a corner of the blanket.

“What are you-” Takeshi Kaneshiro waves a feathered fan on the TV screen, “oh?”

Nayoung shrugs, “It’s a pretty good movie.”

Jieqiong sneaks a popcorn kernel out of Nayoung’s bowl, “Mmhm, but the subtitles aren’t great.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, like he didn’t say ‘let’s.’ He said, ‘after you’,” Jieqiong says as she grabs a handful of popcorn, “and I know that’s not really wrong, but it’s not the same.”

“Ah.”

The movie continues, now there’s something going on with ships and water and Nayoung sort of gets what is happening since there are subtitles but it doesn’t seem entirely right. Maybe she should have rented a DVD instead of downloading the movie off the internet and searched for subtitles from sketchy sites.

“Oh they totally didn’t say that,” Jieqiong mutters under her breath for the fifth time.

Nayoung reaches for the remote and turns the TV off.

“Eh?” Jieqiong’s eyes are wide and really close to her face. Nayoung leans back a little and Jieqiong scoots back at the realization.

Nayoung shrugs, “it was getting confusing.”

“The subtitles were bad,” Jieqiong says, “and they should feel bad. Where did you even get those subtitles from? Didn’t this show in theatres? It’s a pretty good movie.”

“You’ve watched it?”

“Only the highest budgeted Chinese film of its time with a crazy star-studded cast? No,” Jieqiong smirks, “there’s no way I watched it while I was at home. Impossible.”

Nayoung snorts, swats at her with a hand.

Jieqiong rolls her eyes, slides off the couch, “I’ll get you a better copy of the movie. Or a Chinese dictionary.”

She does both and Nayoung gets to watch things burn and go up in flames.

* * *

Nayoung dusts the Chinese dictionary off with a mournful sigh. She knows it is not going to help but feels that perhaps its presence will do something for her. Just maybe.

Oh, who is she kidding.

She does not even know if it is the right link, just grabbed it off of social media and here she is but the stream link seems incredibly shady, she understands none of the words on the screen and it’s already been ten minutes since it should have started but still there is nothing.

Maybe she should go out and ask Minkyung about it. Or Sungyeon. They both read Chinese characters way better than Nayoung does so at least they’d know if it’s the wrong link and besides she knows it is past 4pm but the timer still says there are 50 minutes to go which does not seem quite right.

She refreshes the page again and the stream is now on and Jieqiong is standing on a stage with some people she has only seen selfies of and even though it sounds like Jieqiong and it is most definitely Jieqiong, there is a strange cognitive dissonance going on just because her mouth is moving but Nayoung has absolutely no idea what she is saying.

Not that this is entirely new because she has definitely overheard Jieqiong speaking in Chinese before, to parents, on camera for short periods of time, but something about this is different.

Something about this is just-

Then it clicks.

This is the way Jieqiong speaks to them in private, Nayoung realizes, even if she has no idea what Jieqiong is saying but this is sassy Jieqiong, comfortable in a way that she has not seen on camera in a long time, being gently made fun of, being lightly embarrassed, but being her unabashedly honest self.

On camera.

Nayoung has not seen this in a very, very long time. Perhaps right in the beginning during IOI, before that whole not-really-an-incident with her saying the wrong thing on camera and angering fans of other groups, but Jieqiong has been quieter in general on camera up until fairly recently with the rest of their PRISTIN family.

She watches, has not the slightest clue as to what is going on, but finds herself smiling and laughing along, wonders idly if this is what it must be like for all their adorable stuttering foreign fans, decides that she is going to learn Chinese.

It seems obvious enough, so obvious that she wonders why she has never seriously thought about this before - sure, they had always stuck to Korean while communicating with Jieqiong to make sure that she picked the language up quickly, but now that she’s basically fluent, it makes sense.

Jieqiong looks so comfortable even if she is a little nervous, but something about the way she is more relaxed shows in her eyes, her stance, her readiness to butt in with random words - a habit that might have been from her usage of Korean though now Nayoung realizes that she does not really know after all.

She really should learn Chinese, should put in the effort to meet Jieqiong halfway.

It’s what she- it’s what a good leader would do.

“Unnie,” the door to her room opens and Siyeon sighs disapprovingly as her eyes rake over Nayoung lying belly down on her bed, chin resting on her laptop, “come on out and join us. We’re all watching. Sungyeon-unnie and Minkyung-unnie are trying to translate. It’s the worst. You need to get them to stop. I’m sure Kyulkyung-unnie isn’t swearing.”

Nayoung picks up the Chinese dictionary and scoots out the door.

* * *

It is right at the end when both Minkyung and Sungyeon freeze and stop joking for a moment.

“Eh,” says Eunwoo, pokes Sungyeon in the cheeks, “She’s talking a lot now. What’d she say?”

“She says we get along well,” Minkyung says smoothly, a little too airily for Nayoung’s liking, and does not elaborate.

Nayoung catches her downwards gaze, makes a note to ask about it later, wishes, wishes, wishes she had learnt Chinese instead of Japanese.

* * *

“So,” she lets Minkyung drag her out of the house on the pretense of buying ice cream, “what was that about?”

“She was asked,” Minkyung says quietly, “if the fact that we were bullying or excluding her was true.”

Nayoung freezes.

“Bullying?”

Minkyung nods, “I found it after looking, seems like there was a post going around on weibo about that. Trended pretty high on the real time search too.”

“And what did she say?”

Minkyung raises her eyebrows, “That it’s not true, of course. That her friends sent it to her asking if it was true and that of course it’s not true, that we play around and joke around and we’re pretty close.”

She pauses, “You know that, don’t you?”

“Know?”

Minkyung shrugs, “That we’re close? That the 98-line fools around all the time? That you’re silly but you’re a kind person and would never deliberately do anything to hurt anyone?”

“I didn’t know there was something going around,” Nayoung whispers.

Minkyung reaches out and pats her gently on the shoulder, “She didn’t say anything to any of us. None of us knew either.”

Nayoung’s stomach twists into unhappy knots.

Minkyung leans her head on Nayoung’s shoulder, lets the silence sit for a few moments before breaking it with a soft, “we’ll do better next time. We will.”

Nayoung nods and decides that when Jieqiong comes back and the younger girls are done flinging themselves at her, when her things are put down and she is well and truly with them again, that she will say to her, “你回来了”.

_You’re back. Welcome home._


	7. After All This Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 7\. Yebin has always liked Minkyung. Always.

  _After All This Time_

* * *

A soft splash.

Minkyung looks up from her soup to see Yebin dabbing at a spot on the table in front of her with a napkin.

She raises an eyebrow.

Yebin pouts, scrunches her nose up, mumbles something under her breath and Minkyung thinks that Yebin might just be the cutest thing she's seen all day.

Or all week. Or all month. Or all her life.

This is a problem, she knows, but she does not have to resolve it just quite yet so Kim Minkyung will let it sit and grow.

Grown adults do not run from their problems but Minkyung does not feel like a grown adult so she will run for as long as she can, for as long as Yebin is willing to chase after her.

Yebin drops grains of rice onto the table and Minkyung has to cover her mouth to hide her smile.

* * *

Yebin has always liked Minkyung.

Always.

From the moment that Minkyung set foot into Pledis and opened her mouth and spoke to the other trainees, Yebin has been smitten. She had not admitted to herself then that she had been smitten but she knows this now, and knows that she definitely was then.

She has never fought the realization because there has never been a reason to fight it. Minkyung is tall and gorgeous and smart and sexy and kind and considerate and dorky and organized and focused and disciplined and talented and most of all she loves all of them fiercely so of course it makes sense that Yebin fell for her and continues to fall for her every single day.

Even though that is the number one thing to never do.

Yebin knows this.

It's the unspoken number one rule of falling for straight girls as a girl.

Don't.

* * *

The Pristin girls are clingy.

They have always been clingy and touchy-feely and Minkyung loves how freely they snuggle up to each other, lives off of the small touches of encouragement, the lightest pats of you-got-this, the strokes of hands through hair or on arms, hell, even that one time Zhou Jieqiong grabbed her ass in public and then spun away smirking.

But nothing feeds her heart quite as much as when Yebin fits her head on Minkyung’s shoulder, snuggles into a comfortable position and just uses her as a pillow.

She knows Yebin uses everyone as a pillow so she tries not to think too much of it but she watches Yebin's chest slowly rise and fall and somehow that drowns out the noise of the world and Minkyung knows, knows, knows that she is in trouble.

Then Yebin slowly, sleepily winds her fingers around Minkyung’s hand and Minkyung lets herself rest her head on Yebin's crown.

* * *

Yebin does not want to think about it.

Thinking about it is going to mean that she has to remind herself that this is all just her own doing, that she is the one that initiates it all, that Minkyung is kind and loves them all and knows that Yebin needs extra love and thus gives it freely and it does not mean what Yebin wants it to mean.

So she shakes the thoughts out of her head, settles for nuzzling up to Minkyung, gets pats on her head for her troubles, pouts and drinks in Minkyung’s soft chuckle, light fingers tracing patterns in her hair.

If she just closes her eyes, she can almost fool herself into believing this is real.

* * *

Yebin loves everyone.

Well, Yebin loves everyone she gets to know properly. Minkyung knows this. She knows that Yebin also likes cuddles and that Nayoung finds cuddling that much in public a little embarrassing because she is the leader, so the role automatically falls to her next, as sub-leader.

She knows Yebin occasionally snuggles up to Kyungwon and the rest of the 98-line and the younger ones too but part of her takes particular pleasure in being the one that Yebin goes to first.

Why that is, she lies to herself, is because of the innate human want to be wanted. It feels good to know that you are someone's first choice and Minkyung knows that she is an asshole but she cannot stop because she does not know where Yebin would be if she did and she does not know if she can deal with that.

* * *

“Hey,” Sungyeon says, “unnie.”

Kyla looks up from her book, then back down but Minkyung knows this is her way of saying that she is listening.

“Hm?”

“Are you just going to keep doing this?”

Minkyung knows fully well what Sungyeon is referring to, stops spinning the pen in her hand, blinks and gives her best innocent look that she knows fools no one in the room, “Spinning my pen?”

Sungyeon rolls her eyes, chucks a sheet of scribbles at Minkyung.

It bounces off of Minkyung’s cheek and falls to the floor.

“No. Your thing with Yebin-unnie. I don't know if you know what you're doing.”

Minkyung says nothing, lets her continue, watches Sungyeon struggle with the phrasing of what they all understand, lets her push through it without helping because this is not a topic she wants to talk about at all so there is literally nothing that she gains from helping Sungyeon voice thoughts she does not want to confront.

Kyla says nothing but Minkyung can see in her eyes the answer to Sungyeon's not-really-question.

Sungyeon huffs.

“Well, you're older and everything, but it's not cool, alright? It's not cool to just use her whenever it's convenient. I love you but I also love her and it's not that she's said anything to me because you know she wouldn't ever. I know I said I don’t know, but I do know, and I know you know what you're doing because you're Minkyung-unnie so please, please, please don't play with her like this. She's not-she's not a thing that you can just throw to a side after. This is Yebin-”

“That's not what it is. I don't want to talk about it,” Minkyung pushes her chair back, grabs her things and stuffs them into her bag, turns to leave the room.

“Unnie,” Kyla says, “You can't keep running.”

_I can try._

Minkyung pushes the door open with way more force than is necessary, almost brains Yebin with the edge.

“Oh hey-” Yebin's eyes light up.

“Gotta run, sorry.”

Minkyung pretends she does not see the way Yebin's face falls, pretends she does not hear the soft resignation in Yebin's voice as the door closes behind her.

* * *

“Is Kim Minkyung being an idiot again today?”

Minkyung swipes at the air where Kyungwon's head is likely to be, contacts hair and tugs.

“Ow! Well screw you too! I'm just here trying to wake you up and this is how you thank me?”

Minkyung mumbles something into her pillow and rolls over.

“Did you dream again?”

She did, but Minkyung is not about to tell Kyungwon what she dreamt about because it was not something she wants to think about again - she is having a hard enough time as it is trying to figure out what she wants without Kang Kyungwon butting into her thoughts and telling her she is an idiot for not seeing the obvious.

Minkyung groans into her pillow, “Go away, Kyungwon.”

“No,” Kyungwon says, “I will not, just like your crush on Yebin.”

Minkyung sits up with a start. Her what-

Kyungwon beams at her, looking way too happy for what has got to be seven in the morning.

“My what?”

Kyungwon shrugs, “Your crush on Yebin. It's ok, only Nayoung and Kyla know. And well, me I guess. Now get your butt out of bed, we're going fishing.”

* * *

“Kyungwon,” Minkyung says after two hours, “this is literally the most boring thing I’ve done in my life.”

She turns and Kyungwon’s softly snoring face greets her.

Minkyung snorts, reaches over and pokes Kyungwon in the midriff. Kyungwon spasms, flails, almost throws a bucket and the fishing rod into the pond.

“You said it would be interesting.”

“Introspection tends to be,” Kyungwon mumbles, clearly still sore that she got poked awake.

“You were sleeping,” Minkyung says.

“I was introspecting in my sleep.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’m not the one in need of introspection though,” Kyungwon shrugs, tugs her line out of the water, calmly hooks another worm then casts it back in, “I’m not the one neck-deep in denial.”

“I am not-”

Kyungwon arches an eyebrow, “are you listening to yourself?”

Minkyung closes her mouth, reaches for her water bottle.

Kyungwon pats her on the back, “You do know that Yebin likes you right?”

“I-y-yeah.”

“So.”

“So?”

Kyungwon sighs, “I didn’t realize I had an idiot for a child.”

“Child? Me?”

Kyungwon shakes her head sadly, wipes an imaginary tear from her eye, “Kim Minkyung. I can’t believe a person can be so smart but yet so stupid.”

“Stop calling me stupid,” Minkyung whines, “you’re supposed to be my friend. You’re supposed to be helping me.”

“You’re beyond helping,” Kyungwon snorts, “I’m here to help Yebin.”

“Et-”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence. You’re the one being dumb.”

Minkyung sighs, buries her face in her hands, “I am, huh. And I’m supposed to be the mature one.”

Kyungwon pats her with the same unwashed hand that put the worm on the hook.

Minkyung shrieks but her heart is lighter than it has been in a while.

* * *

“Do you like me?”

Yebin blurts out, fiddles with her fingers, sneaks a glance upwards, wide-eyed and crazy adorable.

They sit in a cafe, Minkyung having dragged Yebin out with her since no one else really wanted to leave the house but Minkyung has been on cafe withdrawal for a long time and really does need her fix of cute desserts, warm pretty drinks and adorable furniture.

“Yes,” Minkyung says.

“Oh,” Yebin says, turns a bright red.

Minkyung sips from her drink, feels particularly adventurous so she pries Yebin's cappuccino from her hands, takes a sip, licks the foam off her lips after.

“Like, like like?”

Minkyung pauses, thinks.

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“Do you like me?”

“Wha-what? I-You-”

Minkyung shrugs, “you like everyone. You're super clingy with everyone.”

“But I-”

Minkyung shrugs again.

“Ok, wait just one moment,” Yebin says, “Wait just one moment. Hold up. I wasn't obvious? What else was I supposed to do?”

Minkyung smirks, “Ask me out?”

Yebin rolls her eyes, huffs.

“Fine. Kim Minkyung, go out with me?”

“I'm pretty high maintenance, I'll have you know.”

Minkyung tries valiantly to fight the blush growing on her face but she flips her hair back and holds out a hand, puts her elbow down on the table to fight the trembling. She hopes Yebin does not notice but the edges of Yebin’s lips curl up into a small knowing smile.

“Yes, Miss let's sit in our PJs and watch One Piece for the entire weekend, I know.”

Minkyung snatches her hand out of Yebin’s, swats at her.

Yebin laughs.

It might just be the cutest thing she's heard all day.

Or all week. Or all month.

Or all her life.


	8. Put Up My Thumb and Shut One Eye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Don’t you touch me with your filthy hands.”  
> Yaebin holds her gloved hands up, “Ok. I have them where you can see them. Not going to touch you. You, me, touching, nah. They’re not dirty though, I swear. I just washed them.”

  **Put Up My Thumb and Shut One Eye**

 

 

 

_Minkyung, Yaebin AU  
_

* * *

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.  
_Neil Armstrong_

* * *

“Don’t you touch me with your filthy hands.”

Yaebin holds her gloved hands up, “Ok. I have them where you can see them. Not going to touch you. You, me, touching, nah. They’re not dirty though, I swear. I just washed them.”

The prisoner growls, flips a wave of red hair that had fallen over her face to reveal sharp eyes and teeth bared in a snarl. Yaebin knows she said she was not going to touch her but by the god are her hands tingling and it has just been so long, so long that she has spoken to someone else, she just kind of wants to shake this stranger by the shoulders to know that she is still here, still alive.

But Yaebin is a woman of her word so instead she sits down directly in front of the prisoner, puts her hands together.

“Do you know who I am?”

The prisoner rolls her eyes, “What is this, Twenty Questions? A movie? Whoever wrote this script sucks.”

Yaebin shrugs, “Ok.”

The prisoner eyes her warily, tugs again at the chains that hold her hands apart. They jangle merrily and she snarls again.

Yaebin waits.

It takes them a while but then they see her. They always do.

She watches the prisoner’s eyes trace her, watches her gaze travel up from Yaebin’s boots to the hems of her sleeves, then upwards to her epaulettes and finally as they land on Yaebin’s tie and collar. Yaebin waits.

“You’re a general,” the prisoner says.

Yaebin nods, “Sorta.”

She sees the flicker of recognition, then the look of sheer panic and the shaking of the chains that accompanies them. Yaebin waits for the prisoner to tire or give up. She wonders if this particular prisoner is going to try to actually spit on her. Sometimes they try.

She does not.

“Why,” the prisoner says, “why are you here?”

“In this room, on this ship, or orbiting this planet?”

Yaebin pauses and looks up at the prisoner from where she is seated on the floor, cocks her head to one side.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I haven’t spoken to anyone in three months,” Yaebin says, “don’t mind if I try-”

“Three months,” the voice is low and threatening, “who was it that you-”

“I liked them,” Yaebin says, “I liked her. She was a cool person even if she didn’t want to talk all that much. Really did surprise me with her strength but I mean, there’s really not all that much point to trying to kill me. It’s really not very useful. They’d just find someone else who likes to talk less and drain more and really, where would we be then?”

“You said she,” the prisoner says.

Yaebin nods, “Nayoung was a cool person.”

The chains still.

“N-Nayoung?”

Yaebin nods again.

“Was?”

“Oh,” Yaebin says, “she’s still alive. Past tense in the sense that I have not seen her in a while but I don’t really do the killing thing. You people are far more useful alive. I think they set her to work somewhere else. I don’t know where though, so don’t try asking me. People don’t tell me things because I talk too much. Or that’s what they said five years ago over the comlink.”

“Where is she? What did you do with her?”

Yaebin sighs, “Can you pay attention for a moment? Didn’t you hear what I just said? I don’t know. She’s not dead though. I didn’t kill her, at least. I didn’t drain everything either. I told you, I said liked her. She’s cool so I left her with just enough to know it’s still there but not enough to well, kill me. Then they took her back down out of orbit and I don’t know anything anymore.”

“You.”

Yaebin shrugs, “I know, I know, short little old me. Sue me for wanting to stay alive.”

“Is that why?”

Yaebin stops.

“Is that why you do this?”

“Ah,” says Yaebin, “yes. I’ve heard this one before. Yes. I like staying alive. It’s kind of nice.”

“But you-”

“I have also heard this one before,” Yaebin says, “and I happen to be relatively comfortable here.”

“What about-”

“The people? Man, and here I thought you might be different.”

The prisoner scoffs, “People? Who cares about the people.”

“Ooh,” says Yaebin, “you have my attention. Not that you didn’t already have it, but you certainly have it now. I like this. Keep going.”

“The people fend for themselves just fine, one dictatorship to another, what’s the difference - no, there’s nothing interesting there. It’s not about protecting or helping or anything. Think about the money. There’s a ton of money out there for various jobs and with your skills and talents I can’t imagine you wouldn’t be able to rack up whatever you need to be comfortable again in less than a week, Angel of Death.”

“You know,” Yaebin says, “that would all be very believable if I didn’t know who you were. Also, I really haven’t heard that name in a long time. Didn’t realize people still used it. It’s really not accurate though. I don’t kill people. Also I kind of just go by Rena now so you should really get them to stop using it when you get back down there. That’d be nice.”

The prisoner stops, eyes narrowing, “What do you mean?”

“I’m so bored,” Yaebin says, “so, so, so bored. You have no idea. Watching the news is so incredibly boring if there isn’t anyone to discuss it with. Do you know that I once counted how many buttons there were on every piece of clothing shown on the news headlines? I had no idea people sometimes put buttons on the insides of things. Like why?”

The prisoner, rather wisely, does not interrupt. Yaebin decides she likes her. Well, that is a lie. Yaebin had already decided she liked her when she walked into the room earlier but that is another matter for another time.

“But yes, as I was saying, you should go back and tell them to stop using that nickname.”

“You’re going to let me out,” the prisoner says flatly.

“Mmhm,” Yaebin says, scoots a little closer to the prisoner’s feet, looks up, “man, you’re kinda tall. This is going to be a pain.”

“What?”

“I said,” Yaebin enunciates each word clearly, “You. Are. Kind. Of. Tall. And. This. Is. Going. To. Be. A. Pain.”

“No, I heard that part,” the prisoner says.

Yaebin beams, “Oh you’re just like her. I like you already.”

“Her?”

“Nayoung,” Yaebin says, “have you been paying attention?”

“I-”

“I know it’s confusing, but do try to keep up,” Yaebin says, “I’m going to release you. In a bit. So you can go back down there and tell them to stop using that name.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” the prisoner looks like she wants to laugh at Yaebin, “but are you really serious right now?”

Yaebin runs her gloved hand over the cuff at the prisoner’s right ankle. It snaps open. She looks up. The prisoner looks back down at her.

Yaebin waits to be kicked.

They just look at each other for what must be a solid ten seconds. Yaebin is not kicked.

Good.

“Well, fuck me,” the prisoner says, “and fuck my inability to keep my mouth shut for my own damn good, but are you actually going to do this?”

Yaebin’s smile grows.

She releases the prisoner’s other ankle and it is wiggled experimentally. Still, Yaebin is not kicked.

“So,” the prisoner says, “you said you know who I am.”

“They send files up,” Yaebin says, “with the food, and the prisoners, of course, so yes, I do know who you are.”

She grins.

“Electricity, right, Kim Minkyung? Oh, how I’ve been waiting for you ever since Nayoung mentioned your powers.”

\---

Minkyung rubs her wrists.

“That’s it? That’s all? All you wanted me to do was change the TV channel?”

The Angel of Death, no, Rena, shrugs, “Yeah. That one was really boring. At least now I can watch animals.”

“Watch animals,” Minkyung says flatly.

Rena pats the spot next to her on the bed, then turns to the shelf next to her and pulls a towel out, “They won’t be coming for you for a few days, you might as well get comfy for now. You can have the bed for now, but for sleeping there is another one on the other end of the pod that you can have. I like this one.”

She leaves the room, bathrobe and towel in hands, then sticks her head back in, “Oh, and please don’t try to crash this thing. It won’t be pleasant for either of us, trust me. Someone tried. It was not fun at all and you will not believe how hard it is to get stains out without bleach.”

Minkyung sits down on military regulation sheets, watches an old rerun of Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter and waits for the Angel of Death to come back from her shower. Oh, Kyungwon and the others will never hear the end of this.

But Nayoung is alive.

Nayoung is alive. Knowing that Nayoung is alive somewhere on the planet, even if she has not returned to them yet gives her a new surge of hope. Minkyung puts her head in her hands, feels her hair beneath her fingers and the warmth of her own skin, lets herself break down just a little. This might just be possible. Even if Nayoung could not do it.

But now it makes sense why Nayoung could not do it, why Nayoung, the most powerful of them all, could not, and why Minkyung is the only one who can.

Oh Nayoung, beautiful, brilliant Nayoung who knew that Minkyung would be the one to try next.

A hand rests on her shoulder and by reflex she reaches back and throws a rather damp Angel of Death over her shoulder onto the small twin bed.

“Uh,” says the Angel of Death, “hi.”

Oh shit, thinks Minkyung. Now she’s dead.

“Right,” says the Angel of Death, sitting up, wet hair wrapped up in the towel, “Military personnel. Right. I always forget. Sorry I spooked you.”

Minkyung tries to stop her jaw from falling open.

“I told you,” she says, “they really don’t send people up here very often. Oh, has anyone told you you’re beautiful?”

Minkyung fails.

\---

Yaebin knocks on the door, knowing fully well that the inhabitant is still asleep, then slides it upon and marches straight up to the bed, fully dressed in her military uniform, the same outfit they had first met in.

“They’re here for you,” Yaebin says, “You’re going to go back down so I’m going to have to do what they sent you up here to have done.”

She watches the sleep clear instantly from Roa’s eyes.

“Hold out your hands,” Yaebin says.

Minkyung does not move.

“I said,” Yaebin says, “hold out your hands.”

Minkyung gathers the blankets around her.

Yaebin sighs, “You don’t have to make this any harder for yourself. Just hold out your hands and it will be over in a flash, no pun intended.”

Minkyung’s grip tightens on the blankets.

“Like I said,” Yaebin says, “I don’t kill people. Also, don’t you have a movement to get back to or something? Even without your powers, you’ll still be useful.”

A small spark flies across the woolen surface.

“I’ll let you spark,” Yaebin says, “I won’t take it all away. That’s evil. I’m not evil.”

“You’re cruel,” Minkyung says, “to leave just a little, just a smidgen of a reminder of what we used to have, I know now why no one has ever come back. They’ve probably all gone insane.”

Yaebin’s face falls a little, then she shrugs, “So I’ve been told, but I’m not responsible for your mental health. I’m just doing what I was sent here to do.”

“You don’t have to,” Minkyung says, “you don’t. You could just send me back down and no one has to ever know.”

Yaebin shrugs, “If no one ever finds out because you never use it, how is it different from taking it away?”

“I-”

Yaebin smiles, “I told you, I like living.”

“This isn’t living,” Minkyung says, gestures to the small pod in orbit around Earth, sealed away from the rest of the world, away from the rest of human civilisation, connected by a single comlink that now only plays animal documentaries, and will likely only play animal documentaries forever, “this isn’t living.”

Yaebin shrugs but Minkyung watches the smaller person flinch.

“Hold out your hands,” Yaebin says more firmly, “don’t make me do it from a distance. We both won’t like it.”

“I’m your last chance,” Minkyung says, “aren’t I, Yaebin-ah?”

Yaebin freezes.

“Who-”

“You’re not the only one who has done their research,” Minkyung shrugs, “and you know I can. You’ve known ever since I changed the channel, haven’t you?”

Yaebin swallows.

Minkyung watches the lump in her throat, then drags her eyes back up, a soft smile on her face.

“I’ll hold out my hands, Kang Yaebin, but only if you’ll take them and come back down to Earth with me.”

* * *

 

A/N: This is now its own story - The Dark Sacred Night


	9. First Snow

**First Snow**   
_ Yaebin, Jieqiong _

_ by Arakano _

 

 

“Yaebin,” Yaebin pauses the music, turns, “Yaebin, you’re done, right?”

Nayoung-unnie pokes her head into the room.

Well, technically Yaebin isn’t exactly done. She could do with a few more rounds of practice before their next evaluation but yes, she has the dance moves down proper and she could head back home if she wanted to. Also, if Nayoung-unnie needs her to be done, she will be done. Yaebin has realized that she will do many, many things for Nayoung-unnie. She has not yet figured out why that is - perhaps because Nayoung-unnie is serious and does not ask for help unless she needs it, perhaps because Nayoung-unnie is the most adorable person on earth. 

Who knows. Yaebin certainly does not.

Yaebin nods.

Nayoung-unnie makes that face, that one face that Yaebin can never say no to, “Could I ask a favor of you?”

Yaebin tugs her iPod out from the speakers, “Yeah, sure.”

Nayoung-unnie rolls her eyes, “I haven’t even said what it is.”

Yaebin shrugs, “You’re a reasonable person, it’s gonna be reasonable.”

She beams as Nayoung-unnie blushes, mutters something like that sound suspiciously like  _ I don’t deserve you guys _ .

“Well,” Yaebin coils up her headphones from the pile she left them in, “What’s up?”

* * *

Yaebin has not really interacted all that much with Pinky.

Well, they have spoken, she has corrected the other’s dance moves before, but Pinky knows Jeonghyun better and they mostly hang out with each other. Or something. Yaebin does not know all that much, she has only been at Pledis for less than a year.

How she finds herself sitting in the train with Pinky heading out to buy pipa strings she does not know.

Well, she does know.

“Well,” Nayoung had said, “you said you played the drums, right? So maybe you’ll be able to show her around somewhere you can buy strings?”

Yaebin had opened her mouth to counter that drums have nothing at all to do with pipa strings, but then closed it at the look on Nayoung’s face.

“Sure,” Yaebin had said, which, she supposes now, is how they are in this situation.

Pinky is fiddling with something on her phone as the train whizzes through the underground.

“Hey,” Yaebin says.

Pinky looks up, smiles at her.

“Are they like, special strings? I mean, I know they’re for the pipa, but are there like levels of strings? Like-” Yaebin frowns, makes a hand gesture, tries to think of how to evoke a sense of high-quality strings with just her hands, unsure if she should expect Pinky to understand.

Pinky shrugs, “I’ll take whatever they have.”

“Ah,” Yaebin says, wants to ask if there are specialty Chinese shops, then shuts her mouth, because if there were, they would be on the way there instead of to Nakwon. Maybe.

* * *

Yaebin has not actually been here before.

Yes, she plays the drums, yes the drums are an instrument, but no, she has never actually bought her own before. She is 13 going on 14 and a drum set is kind of a bunch of money.

There a whole ton of shops, all really shiny, most with a ton of really shiny guitars with crazy price tags on them. Yaebin gulps. This is probably a mistake, probably a really bad idea. They probably don’t sell pipa strings.

She tears her eyes away from the million won guitar hanging in the storefront to find that Pinky has already gone into the shop.

“Excuse me,” Pinky says, “do you sell strings for the pipa?”

“The what?”

Pinky shrinks a little, “The pipa. It’s a-It’s alright. Thank you for your time.”

She grabs Yaebin’s hand and tugs her out of the shop. Yaebin can feel her hands shake a little.

They stop about halfway down the hall, well, Yaebin does. Pinky looks back at her, confused.

Yaebin fiddles with the straps on her backpack, takes in a deep breath, “You asked in this shop, so I’ll ask in the next one.”

Pinky’s eyes widen.

* * *

Well.

They sit in McDonald’s, Yaebin scooping ice cream out from a sundae, Pinky nibbling on an apple pie, having asked basically every shop in the building if they sold pipa strings.

“So,” Yaebin asks, “this is probably a dumb question, but you play the pipa?”

Pinky looks up from her apple pie, nods.

“Is this like, urgent?”

“Urgent?”

“Like, do you need the strings now?”

Pinky pauses.

“Oh,” says Yaebin, realizing that strings rarely break unless they are being used, “were you practicing for the evaluation?”

Pinky nods, “Yeah.”

Yaebin frowns, “Then what are you going to do?”

Pinky’s eyes narrow a little.

Yaebin holds her hands up, “I just want to help. I-I- Nayoung-unnie asked me to help, so all I want to do is help.”

Pinky shrugs again but she twists a napkin between her fingers, “I’ll just do a dance or something.”

The evaluation is next week. There is time to learn a new dance but not all that much time to properly master it. Yaebin does not know exactly how critical it is that they blow the coaches away with this evaluation but a week really is not a long time.

She scoops the last bit of ice cream out of the bottom of her sundae, “C’mon. There’s still places we can go.”

“Eh?”

* * *

“Uhm,” Yaebin says to herself, as they step out from Daelim station, “I think I might not have thought this through.”

The 40 minute train ride to a place that the internet said might have something has ended up putting them in a place that looks like China alright, but the more important part is that it is now dark, and in the middle of winter, whatever shop might have sold pipa strings is likely to be closed.

And it is snowing. Yaebin grumbles to herself, tugs on a pair of gloves, digs into her backpack for her scarf.

All bundled up, she turns behind, only to not see Pinky.

“Oh shit,” Yaebin mutters, she cannot possibly have lost their foreign friend in the subway, can she? How is she ever going to explain this to Nayoung-unnie? She was sure that Pinky had been following her-

“Yaebin!”

She looks up at the excited shout from across the street, sees Pinky jumping up and down in a sweatshirt as small snowflakes fall from the sky, “Yaebin, hurry up!”

Yaebin zips her long coat up and hurries across the slippery street, doing her best to not slip and fall and make a fool of herself.

Pinky latches onto her arm, puts cold fingers into Yaebin’s gloved hands, tugs her excitedly down streets with a bunch of characters Yaebin vaguely recognizes. Yaebin has the disconcerted realization that she is at once utterly lost but also comforted because clearly at least one of them knows what they are doing.

Then she realizes that she is the one that knows the address of the music shop.

* * *

“Ah,” says Yaebin.

The two of them stand outside a shop window. Behind the glass, a pipa stares back at them. The OPEN sign is clearly off. 

Aw dangit.

“Sorry,” says Yaebin, scratches her head, “I guess I should have called before we came. Heh.”

Pinky does not move for a moment. 

Yaebin deflates. The one thing she should have done, that her mother would have told her to do...

She is suddenly attacked with a giant hug around her midsection. Yaebin yelps as Pinky buries her face into the shoulder of her puffy coat.

“Thank you,” she hears the muffled sound.

Yaebin pats Pinky on the head, “Uh, you’re welcome?”

* * *

Yaebin’s phone buzzes. She tugs it out of her pocket.

Oh. Crap. She did say she would be back earlier. What time- Ohhh no. Oh no, oh no.

“Hey, mom?”

“Kang Yaebin,” she hears her mother, “where on earth are you? It’s dark and you said you would be home two hours ago.”

“Uh,” Yaebin says, looks up and around her, reads the road sign, “Dae. Lim. Station.”

“Dae-Where?! Kang Yaebin!”

“I’m with a friend, mom. I’ll be home soon?”

Yaebin hears the sigh from the other end, “You better be home before the trains stop running! Your father is not going to go driving out there to get you in this snow!”

“Y-Yes mom.”

“And tell your friend that their parents are probably worried too! You’re only 14, you shouldn’t be out so late!”

“It’s 8,” Yaebin says.

“It’s dark,” her mother says, “so it’s too late for kids like you to be running around where did you say you were again?”

“Daelim,” Pinky pipes up from the side, “We’re at Daelim station, auntie! Yaebin’s here to help me buy something. Sorry for keeping her!”

A pause.

“Have the two of you eaten, Yaebin?”

“No, but we’ll get dinner then head right back?”

She hears a sigh, winces.

“If I don’t see you at home in two hours, Kang Yaebin, I’m going to call the police!”

“But moooooom!”

Pinky giggles.

“Don’t you ‘but mom’ me! Two hours and that’s final! Now stay warm, make sure to watch both ways before you cross the road-”

“I know, I know-”

“Did you just interrupt me, Yaebin?”

“Uhm, no. Sorry.”

“And make sure your friend makes it back home safely, alright?”

“Yes mom.”

“Alright, see you. Love you.”

Yaebin can hear her mom waiting, mutters a quick, “love you too.”

“BYE AUNTIE!” Pinky half-shrieks from the side.

Yaebin’s mom snorts.

Yaebin sighs. Pinky beams back at her.

* * *

Yaebin feels a tug on her sleeve.

“Is there anything you don’t eat?” Pinky peers at her.

Yaebin shakes her head.

“Ok,” Pinky grins, “do you trust me?”

Yaebin wants to say no, because this is clearly the first time she has actually hung out with Pinky and for all they know she might be bringing them to eat dog meat which Yaebin is not necessarily entirely opposed to (she has not thought about this before), but also kind of does not want to eat right now.

But Pinky’s puppy dog eyes prove to be too much for Yaebin and she feels herself nod, lets herself be led into a shop where none of the words on the front are in Korean.

The smell of spices hits her at once, as does the heat from the grills at the table. Pinky is already shedding her coat with a broad grin, motions for Yaebin to put her things down as well as they huddle around a small table.

Yaebin still has no idea what they are eating.

The ahjumma in the front sidles over to them, opens her mouth and Yaebin has the sudden distinct realization that this must have been how Pinky feels when the two of them chatter away happily in a language that Yaebin understand barely anything of.

Instead, she sits there, fiddles with her cup of tea, reads things off of the Korean menu on the walls but has no idea what is actually being ordered.

She kind of hopes dog meat is not on the table.

“Hey, uh,” Yaebin says once the ahjumma has made her way back to the kitchen, “what did you get?”

“Skewers,” Pinky grins at her, “I haven’t had them in a really long time. They’re not really traditional food where I come from either, but it’s something that is just really hard to find here.”

“Skewers,” Yaebin parrots.

Pinky nods.

“Of?”

“Lamb,” Pinky smiles, though the smile fades a little, “What were you thinking?”

“N-Nothing,” Yaebin says, realizes the moment she said it that she really should not have opened her mouth at all, “Nothing at all.”

Pinky frowns at her, “I wouldn’t, you know.”

“I mean, it’s not like it’s bad or anything,” Yaebin shrugs hastily, “I just honestly don’t know. I really don’t know anything and I’m sorry.”

Pinky deflates a little.

Yaebin nibbles on her lower lip. Good job Yaebin. Look at you go.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, “that really wasn’t cool.”

Pinky shrugs, “I mean, you’re not the first person to ask, and it’s not like the storefront display helped.”

Yaebin remembers the storefront display.

“Heh,” she grins sheepishly.

Pinky rolls her eyes but smiles.

* * *

“So,” Yaebin says around a mouthful of really delicious skewers, “your real name isn’t Pinky, right?”

Pinky snorts into her cup.

Yaebin grins, sticks her tongue out.

“It’s not,” Pinky says.

“Then what is it?”

“Jieqiong,” she says.

Yaebin blinks.

Pinky giggles.

“Yeah, if it were easy, I would have taught it to you.”

Yaebin brandishes her skewer stick like a small sword, “Is that a challenge?”

Pinky raises her eyebrows, “You won’t be the first person to embarrass yourself.”

“Challenge. Accepted.”

Pinky groans, “Must you really, Kang Yaebin?”

“Must I what? Succeed in one go?”

“Hah. You wish.”

“Jiechong,” Yaebin says.

Pinky snorts, “I’ll give you points for trying and a few more for being sort of close. It’s not really a sound you have in Korean, the Qi sound.”

“Chi?”

“Qi,” Pinky says, “Qi-ong. Qiong. Jieqiong.”

“Qi,” says Yaebin, feels the sounds out on her tongue, “Qiong. Jieqiong.”

Pinky raises her eyebrows, “Huh.”

Yaebin wiggles her skewer stick, “Told ya. I’m a quick learner.”

* * *

Yaebin is really regretting not bringing a beanie out by the time she stands outside the dorm, shuffling up and down and rubbing her hands to keep warm as Pinky fiddles with the keycode for the apartment block.

“Do you have it or should I call Nayoung-unnie?”

“N-No, I got it,” Pinky mumbles, punches in the numbers. She pushes at the door and it jangles but does not open.

“Damn it,” she mutters.

“I can call her. I bet she’s awake anyway,” Yaebin says, starts peeling a glove off of one hand.

“I got it,” Pinky shakes the door again and this time it opens. She turns back with a triumphant grin that bares her canines.

Yaebin snorts.

“See you tomorrow!” Pinky waves, “thanks for taking me around!”

“Bringing,” Yaebin mutters. 

“What?”

“I said ‘bringing’,” Yaebin says.

Pinky laughs, “Sure, Teacher Kang. See ya! Bye Yaebin!”

“Bye Jieqiong!” 

Jieqiong’s mouth falls open.

Yaebin grins, sticks out her tongue before turning around with a jaunty wave, damn near slipping, and almost falling on her butt.

Jieqiong’s laughter follows her down the street.

 


	10. Dibs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We’re grad students!”
> 
> “Uh huh,” says Minkyung, “your point being?”

 

Dibs  
_Nayoung/Minkyung/Jieqiong_

* * *

“We’re grad students!”

“Uh huh,” says Minkyung, “your point being?”

“She’s an undergrad.”

Minkyung leans closer, “So? I was an undergrad once.”

“T-That was different! You approached me!”

“Good point. But you can still talk to her,” Minkyung smirks, “Undergrads don’t bite. Well, not all of them do.”

“I know they don’t bite,” Nayoung whines.

Minkyung leans in, “see, she’s looking this way.”

“W-What?”

“Ooh,” Minkyung’s grin widens, “She has nice eyes. I like her. If you don’t want to go up, don’t mind if I do.”

“That’s not fair,” Nayoung whines again, “that’s not fair, Minkyung.”

“Well, if you’re not going to do anything and you don’t let me do anything, she might go off dancing with Mr. What’s His Face over there.”

“...you didn’t say she was straight.”

“I don’t know anything about her,” Minkyung laughs, “besides her name. How am I supposed to know if she’s straight?”

“Then why do you want me to-”

“Ah ah, I don’t _want_ you to do anything, you know you want to. Besides, the way she’s watching us doesn’t scream straight to me.”

“She’s watching us?!”

“Yes,” Minkyung smirks on Nayoung’s skin, before pulling her into a kiss, “oh yes, she is.”

* * *

Jieqiong feels her throat go dry.

She had not been meaning to look over in that direction. It was more a coincidence than anything but then she meets the eyes of Kim Minkyung, one of the grad students in her grad elective, watches as Minkyung’s gaze drops, realizes with a start that she is herself watching Minkyung’s lips as they place themselves on the skin of someone else.

Oh god.

Jieqiong needs a drink. Right now.

She gently tugs her hand out of some guy’s, not remembering when that had actually happened, laughs airily at the “Babe, where are you going?”

_Babe._

She does not even know his name.

_And you don’t know theirs either but it doesn't stop you from looking._

Her eyes flick back.

They’re kissing.

God, she hadn’t been planning on getting drunk tonight but maybe it would be a good idea, if only to get the thoughts of those pairs of eyes on her skin and those two lips on hers out of her head.

* * *

“Well,” Minkyung smirks, “I don’t think she’s entirely straight, even if she did come in with a guy.”

Nayoung licks Minkyung’s lip balm off her lips, “What?”

Minkyung laughs, “Oh, I don't know what to do with you, Nayoung. Seriously. Just go up to her. I think she went to get drinks.”

“Where? Should I just…”

Minkyung raises her eyebrows, “Nayoung, it's just talking to a- Wow. You're serious huh.”

“I mean-I- Stop teasing me!”

Minkyung laughs, “Oh this is going to be good. She's in the other room. Just go.”

Nayoung whines. Minkyung just shoves her (gently) away, and takes a sip from her own glass.

* * *

“I can't.”

Minkyung turns around to see Nayoung without Zhou Jieqiong in tow.

“Wait what?”

Nayoung’s look is mournful, “you didn't tell me she was foreign. I don't speak Chinese.”

Minkyung chokes on her pretzel stick, knows that Zhou Jieqiong is in her economics class and speaks fluent Korean. Then she sees one of the other Chinese students heading out of the room and puts two and two together.

Ah.

“Minkyung,” Nayoung says, “You speak Chinese right?”

Uh.

Minkyung smirks, finishes the pretzel stick.

“You bet I do.”

(No, she doesn't. Not really. But Nayoung doesn't need to know that.)

* * *

“ _Are you Jieqiong?_ ”

Jieqiong turns.

Holy. Shit. She's even more gorgeous up close, when she's not kissing Kim Minkyung, whoever this person is.

“ _Yeah, that's me,_ ” she says, only now registering that she was spoken to in Chinese.

Oh.

My.

God.

Jieqiong did not believe she could melt but is discovering now that it is possible.

“ _Are you Chinese?_ ”

The taller girl looks visibly alarmed. Ah. Maybe they're learning. Jieqiong has had enough experience with language learners (easiest way to earn money tutoring - just chat about your week in your native tongue, what could be easier) to know that it takes courage to speak in the language.

She smiles, slows her words down, “ _Are you learning Chinese?_ ”

If possible, the other girl looks like she is about to bolt and Jieqiong wants to squee and also squeeze her really adorable cheeks but that's not what you do to someone you just met at a party.

_“Chinese?”_ she asks.

“Nayoung,” says the other person.

Jieqiong bites back a snicker and a you're adorable, holds out a hand, “ _Jieqiong, it's nice to meet you_.”

“Uhm,” Nayoung's brows furrow and a look of intense concentration comes over her face, _“I uh, I'm Nayoung and I love you_?”

Jieqiong's jaw drops, then she works it out and bursts out laughing, _“Sorry darling, we just met. But you're cute.”_

“Sorry? Did I say something wrong, uh I mean,” Nayoung looks incredibly flustered which is super cute, _“Wrong?”_

Jieqiong bites back another snicker, grins, “Who told you about me?”

She sees the cogs turn in Nayoung's brain - very attractive - before Nayoung whirls around to see a smirking Minkyung who hastily holds her hands up and disappears away in the crowd.

“I'll be right back,” Nayoung says.

Jieqiong giggles, “Ok, Nayoung. I'll be right here.”

* * *

“Minkyunggg~” Nayoung pouts and it is a look that Minkyung knows she cannot win against.

“Yes?” She maintains as straight a face as she can.

“You lied to me.”

Minkyung shakes her head, “Nuh uh.”

“You said she didn't speak Korean!”

“I said nothing,” Minkyung shrugs, finishes her drink.

“And whatever you taught me, that definitely wasn't ‘How are you today?’”

“Now that's true,” Minkyung laughs.

Nayoung pouts.

“If you didn't want me to talk to her you could have just said so.”

Minkyung raises her eyebrows, “But I'd love for you to talk to her. I bet she's a good kisser. You can go first and I'll watch.”

Nayoung groans and buries her face into Minkyung’s laughing shoulder.

“You're such a meanie!”

“Uh,” Minkyung says, “I'm not kidding though?”

“Then you talk to her!”

“I was going to! Then you stopped me!”

“You know what, you are a meanie butt.”

Minkyung laughs, pinches Nayoung's cheeks then swoops down for a quick kiss, “Love you too.”

* * *

She watches them kiss. Again.

Yup.

The smile slowly fades off her face. And here she was thinking this could have been a little different.

Just another dare.

Jieqiong knows it so why she always lets it hurt she does not know.

She can't say she doesn't get it - she supposes it must be kind of amusing to watch friends embarrass themselves in front of the foreign student since some people always seem to enjoy seeing others embarrass themselves.

If only she did not form stupid little crushes so easily.

Nayoung is really adorable. Jieqiong knows she said that they had only just met, but that kind of adorableness is honestly right up her alley. And she definitely has eyes and knows how attractive Minkyung is even half asleep with barely any makeup on.

Oh, what is she thinking.

Jieqiong steps out of the room, wanders past a few couples making out in the dark, resists the urge to find someone who would be willing to kiss her hard enough for her to forget, and makes her way outside into the cooler air.

She really should just go home.

Jieqiong fiddles with her phone, starts calling a ride.

“Heading home already?”

Jieqiong turns to a familiar yet foreign voice. Kim Minkyung comes sauntering up.

“Yeah,” says Jieqiong, standing her ground and looking her square in the eye, “Yes, I think I've had enough fun and games for tonight.”

“The night is still young,” Minkyung says as she draws closer.

Jieqiong resists the urge to take a step back, “I've had enough disappointment for tonight, so don't mind me.”

Minkyung stops, frowns, “Disappointment? But who would-oh.”

She sighs, “What did Nayoung say to you? I'm sorry if it was offensive. She doesn't speak Chinese so I don't know if she got the tones right. And I don't speak enough to know if it could have sounded rude.”

Jieqiong shakes her head.

“Not Nayoung? But you weren't with anyone else all evening,” Minkyung says.

Jieqiong frowns, “And how would you know that?”

The tips of Minkyung’s ears, barely visible in the light, turn a little red, “Well… We might have been watching you?”

“Why?”

“Uh,” Minkyung says.

“It's not cool to make fun of foreign students like this, you know. We have feelings too.”

Minkyung blinks, “Oh, oh, no, no no. I wasn't making fun of you. I'm sure Nayoung wasn't either. We just uh,” she grins sheepishly, “thought you were kinda cute.”

“You what?”

“Think you’re kind of cute,” the twinkle returns to Minkyung’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Jieqiong says, “I must have heard you wrong. Aren’t you two-”

Minkyung shrugs, “I mean, we are.”

“Then…?”

“I mean,” Minkyung says, “I have eyes too, you know. And it was kind of just an idea that came into my head one day in class when I was looking at you and thinking about Nayoung and-”

“Wait, you were what?”

Minkyung coughs, “I was looking at you and thinking about Nayoung and it just clicked that maybe I should have you two meet and see if you hit it off because that would be kind of really cute.”

“I-”

“Oh, I mean, I totally get if you don’t want to share, but I kind of got to her first so if you do want some you’ll have to share.”

Jieqiong does not think her jaw could drop any further.

“And she’s-”

Minkyung shrugs, “I don’t think she’s thought about it nearly as much as I,” her smirk grows, “or you have. She just saw you earlier today and she’s already smitten, goodness. I guess same goes for you, but you’re a little more straightforward, huh?”

“I’m only thinking about it because you’re talking about it!”

“Still counts.”

Jieqiong splutters.

Minkyung takes a step closer, “And don’t think I haven’t noticed you watching me in class either.”

Jieqiong huffs but does not step away, “ _I have eyes too, you know._ ”

Minkyung laughs.

* * *

Nayoung returns back from the bathroom to see Minkyung awfully, awfully close to Jieqiong, watches Minkyung lean in.

“Hey,” a kid from her lab says, “isn’t that your-”

“Mind your own damn business,” Nayoung snaps though she marches straight up to them.

“Uh oh,” she hears Minkyung say.

Jieqiong jumps backwards as though jolted. She has gorgeous eyes, Nayoung notices, even widened in shock they are incredibly expressive. The tip of a tongue darts out in nervousness to wet those lips and for a moment Nayoung is completely, utterly distracted.

“I-”

“Not you,” Nayoung says, shaken out of her reverie, as she turns to Minkyung.

Minkyung has the broadest grin on her face like the cat that got the cream, “Yes darling?”

“One moment,” Nayoung says to Jieqiong, moves to take Minkyung’s elbow and steer her to a side to have a discussion.

Minkyung evades her, stays right where she is, “Yes?”

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

Nayoung glares at Minkyung who stares defiantly back.

“Can I go back to doing what I was going to do?”

Nayoung’s jaw drops - sometimes she forgets just how forward Minkyung is - which is a little silly considering the younger girl literally walked straight up to her and propositioned her at the end of year social last year.

“Let’s talk about this.”

“Ok,” Minkyung’s eyebrow is raised in a challenge. Nayoung has the sinking feeling that Minkyung is absolutely aware of what Nayoung’s actual objection to this scenario is. Minkyung has always been appallingly sharp.

To further prove her point, Minkyung’s lips curve up at their edges just the way Nayoung loves them, “You wanted to talk?”

Nayoung sighs, pouts, “You said I could go first.”

Minkyung laughs.

* * *

A/N: Written for JC who planted this idea in my head. I know it's not the #IfPristinWinROTY story you wanted but I'll get to that sometime.


	11. On Sundays We Protect Nayoung

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Minkyung’s first thought is “Oh God, Nayoung.”

 

On Sundays We Protect Nayoung

* * *

Minkyung’s first thought is “Oh God, Nayoung.”

She scrambles to grab her coat and a face mask, throws on a pair of not-embarrassing jeans and is down the block before her phone buzzes with the notification.

No, no, no.

She stops right outside the room, can hear Nayoung talking to the screen, then the sound of the chair scraping back.

The door opens and she meets Kyungwon's eyes.

_What do we do?_

_I don't know._

They say their mechanical goodbyes to the managers and head back to the dorm. All this while, Nayoung reads from her phone. Then she puts it down as they stand outside the door.

“I'm going on a walk,” Nayoung says.

Minkyung and Kyungwon exchange glances.

“We're coming,” Kyungwon says and Nayoung's eyes flick back to her phone.

Minkyung gently takes her arm, “We're coming with you.”

Nayoung shrugs, tugs the beret off her head and wraps her coat around herself in a hug before she strides off quickly, forcing the two of them to jog a little to keep up.

Minkyung has gone on walks with Nayoung before, even when the leader has been agitated and frustrated and not a single time has she kept this pace up for so long.

So much for being old, Minkyung smiles wryly. Kyungwon nudges her in concern, jerks her head at the visible and audible puffs of air.

“Hey,” Minkyung says as she runs up to her.

She can feel Nayoung's frown in the air before she even sees it.

“I just need some time,” Nayoung says, “alone.”

The fear she had been putting off rushes up to Minkyung in that one moment, threatens to overwhelm her.

Nayoung's brows knit in worry and Kyungwon grabs onto her arm.

“I. It's ok,” Minkyung says, “It's ok to cry and show weakness in front of us. It's ok to not be strong, to not be perfect. We-we-it's OK.”

Nayoung's face twists further.

“It's us, Nayoung.”

Kyungwon nods.

“It's just us. You're not, you don't have to, you should never need to feel that you have to be someone else with us. We're-”

“But it's because it's all of you,” Nayoung says softly, “you deserve so much more than I can give you and-”

“We don't even deserve you,” Kyungwon says quietly, “We really don't, but you're here and we can't even begin to-”

“We could never think any less of you for anything like this.”

“Never.”

“There's nothing,” Minkyung says, “nothing you could do now after all you've done for all of us that could make us think any less.”

Nayoung stops.

Kyungwon walks straight into Minkyung who catches her with a sigh.

A soft, sad smile comes to Nayoung's face. The wind picks up a little, tickles her cheeks with stray strands of her hair.

“As a fan,” Nayoung says, “I loved him once. I did. I really did. I followed everything I could find and I went to things I could go to and then one day I just didn't anymore.”

Minkyung rests a hand on her shoulders.

“And I know that it's stupid to think of it like this but I just can't help but stop thinking about it and how much I wish I could have said something, said anything to anyone that might have changed this and I know, I know, I know that probably nothing would have changed if I had stayed a fan or said something but I just feel like-”

She chokes, takes a big gulp, brings her hands to her eyes, “I just feel like I could have and I should have and I didn't.”

“You couldn't have known,” Minkyung says, “this was a battle that wasn't on you to fight.”

Nayoung shrugs, “He wasn't private about it - I knew, fans knew, we just didn't know much because this is so private and he'd already said so much more than people usually do and then I think about how they didn't really know either so what if- what if-”

Minkyung’s heart clenches as Nayoung looks at them like her world is shattering.

“No,” Minkyung says, “no. No.”

Kyungwon shakes her head, “It would never, never be on you.”

Nayoung shakes hers, “How could it not be?”

Minkyung hugs her, closes her eyes, lets Nayoung tremble in her arms, feels Kyungwon hug both of them.

“I can't speak for the others, can make no promises, but we know you love us, Nayoung. We do, we do, we do.”

“But what if that isn't enough,” Nayoung says,” What if it isn't? I can't. I know it's irrational but I can't, I just can't.”

“And we'll hope that you'll never have to,” Minkyung says, “We'll hope you never have to.”

“But,” Nayoung's voice cracks, “But I thought about it and I can't.”

“No one expects you to,” Kyungwon says, “at the end of the day this is a job, we work together, you're not responsible for our lives.”

Nayoung recoils.

Kyungwon shrugs, “I mean, I love all of you, Nayoung. I do, I really do, and I would choose to hang out with all of you any day when I didn't have to if I wasn't already with you all the time. And I love music as well but what I choose to do with my life is on me, not on you. I'm my own master. I make my own decisions. You need to know that.”

Nayoung pouts, “That's not what I meant and you know that.”

Minkyung smiles, “We know.”

Kyungwon shrugs, “But also, you needed to know that. We need you to herd us to and from the car, to pull us together as a team, to take us higher, but if we were to individually stumble and fall, we would never hope that you would prevent us from getting hurt, only that you would be there to help us pick ourselves up, to dust us off and to be there for us. That's what you do for us now, already, and we could ask for nothing more.”

She shuffles at Minkyung’s look of surprise, “What? I have deep thoughts from time to time too, dumbass.”

Nayoung giggles as Minkyung slaps Kyungwon lightly on the shoulder.

“I won't say never,” Minkyung says, “Because never is a very strong word and it would almost be disparaging to say that we would not, but I will say that I want to believe, that I hope that none of us will ever reach that point, that if it is needed that we'll get the help there is.”

Nayoung's eyes are sad but Kyungwon cuffs her on the shoulder, “We're here for you. Like you've always been for us. We'll be here.”

Almost as if on cue, her phone rings. Minkyung smiles, puts it on speaker.

“Is she there?”

Yaebin's voice comes over the phone.

“I'm going to go strangle some of our so-called fans and you can't stop me, Eunwoo-unnie.”

Nayoung giggles.

“You probably shouldn't, Siyeon-ah.”

“B-But Yewon-unnie, they-”

“Did you hear Yewon or did you not hear her?”

“Yes, Sungyeon-unnie, I heard Yewon-unnie loud and clear.”

Then a notification for a group video call.

“Lol, Joo Kyulkyung, aren't you supposed to be busy earning money?”

“Where is Nayoung-unnie? She's not with you?”

Nayoung waves feebly.

“Hi,” she says.

Kyulkyung's face gets bigger on their screens as does Yaebin's and Minkyung chuckles.

Kyulkyung makes a face, “Keep an eye on her for me while I'm not there.”

Sungyeon snorts, “We'll keep an eye on her regardless of whether you wanted it or not, your royal highness. She's ours. All of ours.”

Kyulkyung pouts, “I know. I just,” her expression grows serious, “I just wish I were with you all right now.”

Minkyung wants to ruffle her hair but Kyulkyung being in China does not help matters. Kyungwon ruffles Minkyung’s hair.

Then Kyulkyung’s smile takes on a teasing note, “But instead I'm here with Xiaoxiao and Jackson-oppa and Yixing-sunbaenim so I guess I'll just have to deal.”

“Jackson- _oppa_?”

“ _Xiaoxiao?!_ ”

Minkyung snorts and mentally prepares herself for a far more sane video chat later when Illa wakes up.  


* * *

A/N: Let me know what you think. Very willing to take this down/edit if it upsets people.


	12. Hands

“Yewon’s doing the thing again,” Sungyeon whispers.

Yaebin looks away from the movie to see Yewon absentmindedly drawing circles on Eunwoo’s arm. Eunwoo lets her, leans her cheek onto Yewon’s elbow. Yewon’s eyes curve into smiles and she gently pats the top of Eunwoo’s head but she stops drawing circles and folds her hands.

“Ah,” says Yaebin.

Her eyes meet Nayoung's from across the room.

_The thing. Yewon’s doing the thing._

Nayoung's eyes flick to Yewon’s still hands before she scoots closer to Yewon and starts playing with her hair. Yewon reaches back and squishes the other of Nayoung's palms in hers, the smile returning to her face as the eight of them watch Arnold Schwarzenegger dump the other robot into molten metal.

* * *

Some days, Yewon wakes up and cannot quite believe that she is a member of a girl group, let alone Pristin. Not that she thinks Pristin is particularly like, famous or anything, no she wouldn't think that way at all, but sometimes she cannot quite believe that Pristin is nine amazing girls and well, ordinary old Kim Yewon. 

She loves them all dearly, she really does, but right next to them Yewon sometimes just feels well, like she is not special at all. She sings well but Sungyeon just exhales a run and Eunwoo-unnie's voice once made her cry. She dances well but Yaebin-unnie is the one that watches videos once and just gets it. She has a nice smile but Minkyung-unnie looks like she eats girls like her for breakfast. She knows English but next to Kyla she just sounds silly. She's not tall like the unnie line and she doesn't have legs for miles and she's shy and awkward and doesn't have the exposure of the other members and she's really just ordinary old Kim Yewon who practices really hard. 

(Besides the fact that with the exception of Yaebin-unnie the rest of Pristin are trash at sports and Yewon is quite good at sports. So that makes her special. But not for most of the year when it doesn't matter if Yewon can out-balance them.)

Yewon still sometimes worries that the managers will come to their senses and ask her to leave. This fear is especially strong in the mornings when no one else in the room is awake except for her and she doesn't even know why she's awake when the others are asleep - did she just not practice hard enough yesterday to tire herself out?

Then Kyulkyung-unnie bursts into the room with a smile that broadens when she sees Yewon. Soft hands pat her head and squish her cheeks and Yewon decides to count her blessings instead of moping because Siyeon did once say that moping did no one any good.

Kyulkyung-unnie beams at her and Yewon feels a little special.

* * *

Yewon is not usually the clingiest of their members, Nayoung knows, but sometimes she turns it on to the highest degree and it catches some of the others off-guard. Not Nayoung. After the clingy touchy-feely fest that was IOI, she's never going to be suprised by arms in hers or a chin on her shoulder ever again.

As if on cue, Yewon wraps hands around her waist and nuzzles her shoulder. Nayoung pats her gently on the head and is rewarded with a broad smile.

There is one thing that Yewon recently started doing that no one else does to her though, which Nayoung will grudgingly admit did actually catch her off-guard. 

The first time Yewon gently stroked almost the entirety of Nayoung's arm, she nearly jumped a foot into the air, startling poor Yewon who then scuttled really far away into Kyungwon's waiting arms. Minkyung had laughed at Nayoung but it had taken a whole day before Yewon came back for cuddles. 

Nayoung learnt then that this was not the first time Yewon had done it to someone, that this is her way of saying ‘I’m here’ and ‘I care’. Nayoung knows also she was lucky that Kyulkyung had been in China then and had not been around to smack her for spooking Yewon.

Yewon’s fingers play on Nayoung's skin again, gently squishing her arm then running her thumbs up and down the back of her hand. Nayoung lets her, understands that the girls do not always communicate with words and if this is how Yewon expresses her love then she'll take it any day.

Besides, Nayoung likes cuddles.

* * *

Yewon watches the others on Produce 101, braces on her teeth that make her consonants sound different and make her singing weird. It's strange how she was training with them just weeks ago and now they're appearing on national television as a unit, as a group. 

She remembers Bang - how many times had they done Bang in the basement practice room to the mirror, perfecting the angles and the moves and the transitions, feels pride swell in her heart when she hears other trainees praise them, feels the thrum of competitiveness in the air as it rushes through their veins, knows that they are there to fight and well, Yewon is here attending school and watching them in the television screen.

They are gorgeous and amazing and intimidating and there to win, Yewon knows that much, because every single one of them is competitive as all hell, sweet soft Eunwoo-unnie included. Even Yewon. Yewon feels her competitive spirit well up but she knows already that this is a loss that is not a loss that she has to nurse until they return.

Yewon follows along, watches as they split up, as Eunwoo-unnie and Kyungwon-unnie are recruited into competing teams, as Yaebin-unnie successfully and quickly picks out Minkyung-unnie, as Nayoung-unnie smartly picks a dance she could do in her sleep, as Siyeon does the daredevil thing and chooses to sing, as Kyulkyung-unnie cries on national television.

Yewon rubs her thumb against the top of her hand. It doesn’t quite feel the same.

* * *

“Yewon-ah!”

Yewon turns, smiles shyly as Kyulkyung-unnie seats herself down across from her and immediately launches into some tirade about the latest thing that someone in the IOI group chat is making fun of her for.

“And did you know they said that they had forgotten what silence sounded like when I was around because I talked so much?”

Yewon knows her face gives her away because Kyulkyung-unnie straightens right up, lips pursed into a sulky pout, brows furrowed and nose slightly scrunched in the way that makes her look like that one hamster plushie.

“I do not talk too much!” 

Yewon nods hastily as Kyulkyung-unnie dramatically flops onto the table groaning “Et tu brute” which Yewon is sure she picked up from Yaebin unnie just yesterday.

Then Kyulkyung-unnie's face turns serious, “You don't mind me, do you? I'm not bothering you?” 

Yewon smiles, shakes her head, wants to say “You fill the silence” but decides she doesn't have to say it.

Kyulkyung-unnie smiles, ruffles Yewon’s hair.

“I like you.”

Yewon whines but beams as her heart skips a beat.

* * *

Sungyeon has figured it out before anyone else, of course. Well, perhaps not before Minkyung-unnie because Minkyung-unnie is insanely sharp but she never says anything unless it requires instant intervention and this is not something that requires any intervention beyond well, just being there.

Kyulkyung-unnie closes her luggage, zips it shut and scrambles the lock, picks her clutch off of the bed, checks that her power bank is in it and then heads out the door.

Sungyeon grunts a “Bye, safe flight” at her as she trails out of the room to the living room. As much as she likes being alone from time to time there is just something about Kyulkyung-unnie's stuff lying around that makes her feel a little lonely even if she would never admit it aloud.

Yewon sits on the living room couch, hands curled under a blanket, looking a little blankly at the shut door.

“Yo,” says Sungyeon. 

“Sungyeon!” Yewon’s hands appear, “Oh you startled me.”

Sungyeon shrugs, sticks her tongue out and slides onto the couch next to Yewon, close enough for Yewon to reach out and poke her.

Sure enough, within seconds, Yewon is playing with her wrist, running her fingers on her skin in what should be ticklish motions but somehow just soothe Sungyeon instead.

Sungyeon has already figured out that this is how Yewon deals with Kyulkyung-unnie being gone, wants to open her mouth and confirm this but the soft happy look on Yewon’s face and the very fact that Yewon is sitting here gently patting her gives her pause.

She knows Yewon still often feels self-conscious (Why she doesn't quite get, because Yewon is amazing, but that is a whole other can of worms) so pointing something like that out might make her stop and to be honest, Sungyeon kind of does not want Yewon to stop.

Minkyung-unnie pokes her head out from her own room, meets Sungyeon's eyes.

A jerk of Minkyung’s head towards the main door.

_Kyulkyung's gone?_

Sungyeon nods.

Minkyung’s eyes flick to Yewon then down to Yewon’s hands stroking Sungyeon's arm.

Minkyung nods then heads back into her room.

Damn, Sungyeon thinks, Minkyung-unnie really is sharp.

* * *

Yewon knows that they could not be two more different people. 

Yewon’s not the kind of person that would be casted off of the streets, not the kind of person that everyone immediately wants to love, not the kind of person who easily laughs off saying the wrong words.

Kyulkyung-unnie flits quickly between intense stage presence and adoring smiles and silly jokes and terrible ideas and pats on the back and words of encouragement and that is not the kind of confidence that Yewon has right now.

But when Kyulkyung-unnie lets her squeeze her hands or rub her cheek against her shoulder or play with her elbow or latch on like a koala bear, it is easy to not think about that and to only think of laughing eyes, easy smiles and gentle pats to her head.

Then when Kyulkyung-unnie first starts going to China and for a while, Yewon does not quite know what to do.

But she figures it out, as she does. Yewon thinks Minkyung-unnie has probably noticed.

And Kyulkyung-unnie comes back, as she does.

* * *

Sungyeon hears it before she sees it, the sound of Kyulkyung-unnie slapping, for the lack of a better word, body lotion onto herself.

She sighs, pries one side of her headphones off of her ear, “Go do that outside.”

Kyulkyung-unnie pouts, “Is that how you say hi to your team member you haven't seen in three days?” 

“Outside,” Sungyeon says, “If this room is going to smell like banana for the rest of the night I'd rather get a few more minutes of normal air. And silence.”

“But you said you liked the banana.”

Sungyeon raises her brows, “I like it more than the others. Out.”

Kyulkyung-unnie sighs, flips her hair faux-dramatically, “If you so insist, your royal Highness.”

Sungyeon rolls her eyes back at her as Kyulkyung-unnie flounces out of the room, taking most of the smell of banana with her.

Then a squeal, “Yewon-ah! Unnie's missed you!” 

Sungyeon smiles to herself. 

And shuts the door.

* * *

A/N: For a friend. Inspired by this: [https://youtu.be/O8kEVFuAFlM?t=6m ](https://youtu.be/O8kEVFuAFlM?t=6m)All errors in interpretation are mine.


	13. How This Ends (1/2)

 

 

 

**How This Ends** _  
(Minkyung/Yaebin)_

_\---_

_"I already know how this story will end"_ _  
_ [ _Anymore - Yu Seungwoo_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84P4XPqIq5w)

* * *

_It starts, as most things do, entirely innocuously._

* * *

_Unnie_ , comes the message at 1:30 in the morning, _Unnie, why does Rebin-unnie take such good photos? It’s not fair._

Minkyung rolls over in her bed, ignores the soft snores that come from around her, raises her eyebrows at Siyeon who is literally looking at her from across the room.

Siyeon looks meaningfully at Minkyung’s phone.

Minkyung sighs, not sure she wants to do this right now.

_She does?_

_Yeah_ , the text from Siyeon says. _Go take a look. G’night._

* * *

At first, Minkyung doesn’t know what Siyeon means by ‘go take a look’ because their group chat has been blissfully silent for the past hour or so, about the time that Nayoung had said “Goodnight”.

And there is nothing new on her instagram that Minkyung has not seen. The last photo is of the two of them from their last promotions, now months ago. She checks the official Twitter accounts, finds nothing there - and the timing would be suspicious, Siyeon would have pointed it out earlier.

The fancafe it is. Minkyung struggles for a few seconds with the accounts and passwords and then she’s in. There are half a million notifications and responses that she swipes through before she finds Yaebin’s post and therefore her account. She sighs. There are thousands of comments in this.

She looks up.

Siyeon nods seriously.

She sighs and starts scrolling.

* * *

“Unnie,” Yaebin laughs, “Hurry up, you’re so slow even though your legs are longer. We don’t have all day.”

Minkyung knows they don’t have all day, just a few hours now after they took the concept photos but before they should be back at the hotel and before the trains stop running, but they are in Japan and they have a few hours to themselves and although Kitakyushu is not Tokyo, Japan is still Japan and Minkyung cannot quite hide the excitement she has at doing the things she has only ever seen in anime.

“Unnie~!”

A tug on her hand and Yaebin pouts. Minkyung lets her drag them into a train car.

“Where are we going?”

“Secret,” Yaebin grins, “it’s a secret.”

“Our train tickets say Kokura Station,” Minkyung says.

Yaebin whines, pouts really hard and Minkyung laughs, her heart warm.

* * *

They miss the last train.

Minkyung is trying hard to not smile at Yaebin’s look of utter dejection. To be fair, she had a part to play in this, they had taken a while to find a convenience store to buy soda from - not just any soda but the special kind of Ramune that she had once seen in an anime, but sitting at the beach for way too long looking out at darkness and just listening to the waves was kind of Yaebin’s fault.

Even if they say nothing, she understands. She understands. They have had so many nights just sitting and talking, she’s heard of all of Yaebin’s expeditions, seen her craft her hopes and dreams and cast them into the sky, the clouds, the seas, watched her plant the seeds and water it and help it all grow and Yaebin tells her everything.

Everything is all her deepest fears and strongest wishes, her silliest most meaningless nightmares and her strongest most real moments of deja vu, her once-upon-a-times and her perhaps-one-days. Yaebin tells Minkyung everything and right now, she doesn’t have to say a thing.

Yaebin doesn’t have to say a thing for Minkyung to know how she feels.

Minkyung doesn’t blame her. They are here in Japan instead of in Korea, Yaebin is missing graduation to take photos for their first album. It is a graduation of a very different kind - everything is shifting and changing and the uncertainty is growing and they are afraid, all of them. What if this does not go well? What if it fails? What if just, nothing happens? What if all their hard work goes to waste?

The platform is entirely empty but for the two of them.

Yaebin chews on her lower lip, fingers tapping anxiously at her phone screen. Minkyung knows this is due to more than just the fact that they are stranded in a different town from their hotel.

“C’mere,” Minkyung says.

“Gotta find a-”

“It’s not important.”

“We have to get back to the hotel,” Yaebin says, “It’s getting late, they’ll start worrying. You’re rooming with Nayoung-unnie, she’ll-”

“Your phone’s good, my phone’s good, we’ll get a taxi or something later. Just come here.”

Yaebin frowns but shuffles over into the hug.

“It’s ok, you know. It’s going to be ok. Everything. This. Getting back to the hotel. Debuting. As ten. It’s all going to be alright.”

Yaebin shakes.

Minkyung puts her arms around her, “It’s going to be alright, Yaebin-ah. It’s going to be alright.”

Yaebin says nothing but snuggles into her embrace.

Minkyung gently kisses her temple.

* * *

“Unnie,” Yaebin yawns sleepily in the taxi, “I’m going to go back to that train station one day. And I’ll take you with me.”

“Hm?” Minkyung stops drawing small circles on the back of Yaebin’s hand, “that train station?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Yaebin smiles, looks at her like Minkyung is her entire world, “You’ll know. One day you’ll know.”

* * *

“You went out again,” Yaebin says, one arm akimbo and the other waggling a finger at her.

“Yes… mom…?”

Yaebin pouts and whines, “You didn’t tell me where you went! And you went out with Kyulkyung!”

Minkyung doesn’t even have to look to know that Kyulkyung is sticking her tongue out at Yaebin.

“It’s a Sunday,” Minkyung laughs, “You don’t wake up til like noon on Sundays, Yaebin-ah.”

“Well,” Yaebin says, “that’s true, but if you’d said that you were going to go out I’d have joined you in the afternoon or something.”

Minkyung shrugs.

* * *

“No,” Yaebin says firmly, “no way. Nope. Nope. Never.”

Eunwoo whines, “but Minkyung-unnie is coming too.”

Minkyung shrugs.

Yaebin meets her eyes for a moment, then shakes her head, “No. You can go and scare yourselves. I don’t want to.”

Eunwoo rolls her eyes, “Alright then, scaredy-cat. Have fun alone at home. In the dark. Alone.”

“Heyyy! That was unnecessary, Eunwoo you meanie!”

Minkyung smiles.

* * *

“Hey,” Minkyung says, jerks a finger at the small puddle of soup that is about to start dripping onto Yaebin’s lap.

Yaebin’s head snaps up and her hand puts her phone down, “Oh crap!”

Minkyung chuckles, passes her some napkins, “Sheesh, pay more attention to your food and less to your phone, child. You were already clumsy to begin with but now that this thing is taking over your life, I swear you’re going to ladle soup straight into your lap one day, young lady.”

Yaebin smiles and sticks her tongue out at Minkyung, dabs at the puddle but picks her phone back up after with a roll of her eyes.

Minkyung sighs, hides the small sinking feeling away and turns back to her own food.

* * *

She hears the whispers in the corridor, sees Kyungwon and Yaebin’s eyes flick hurriedly up to her then down and away as they head back to their respective rooms.

“What’s up?”

Kyungwon doesn’t meet her gaze.

“Hm?”

Minkyung pauses.

“Nothing.”

Something feels off but Minkyung cannot put a finger on it, almost as if something small has shifted, like something in the world has changed and oh-.

Oh.

It hits her like a punch in the gut, or she feels like it should, except that the world keeps turning and Minkyung now knows that there is something about Yaebin that she does not know.

* * *

“You watched the Conjuring?”

“Two, two,” Yaebin’s quick correction comes from the living room, “but I read the plot before I went so it wasn’t so scary.”

Eunwoo sniggers, Minkyung hears the clatter of silverware against one of their bowls, “Did you cry?”

“No! I didn’t!”

“Then did you scream?”

Minkyung hears Yaebin sigh, then Eunwoo yelps, “Ow, Yaebin! You didn’t have to hit me that hard.”

“What’d she say? Did she scream?”

Yaebin murmurs something that Minkyung cannot hear as Kyungwon comes into the room and closes the door behind her.

* * *

Minkyung lets the apartment door close behind her, looks up to see Yaebin sprawled all over the couch, nose in her phone.

“Hey,” she says.

“Oh hey,” Yaebin says, looks up, smiles at her, then back down to her phone.

Minkyung walks to her room.

* * *

She tries at 7am the next Sunday.

Kyulkyung is out somewhere. Or in China. She sometimes forgets. Nayoung is home at her parents’ - after they moved up to Seoul, Nayoung sometimes spends nights with them on weekends such as this one.

Minkyung understands.

She gently eases the door to the other room open to find Eunwoo curled up in a ball, blanket half off of her as Yewon tosses around. Minkyung lifts Eunwoo’s blanket from the floor and tucks the younger girl in. Eunwoo mumbles something. Minkyung pats her gently on the head.

It is Sunday, the 28th of January and Yaebin’s bed is empty, her blanket neatly folded. Her backpack is not there. Neither is her clutch.

Minkyung figures she’ll raise the alarm if Yaebin is not back by their next practice session on Wednesday, but Yaebin comes back on Tuesday and says nothing.

Minkyung does not know where she went.

* * *

Minkyung gets to the end, past the pictures of the moon that had been posted in the last post, past the pictures of water, to the train station then to the two tickets.

She stops as if someone had just upended an entire glass of water on her head, stops as she reads Sunday, sees Kokura Station laugh back at her, feels her heart stop for just a fraction of a second.

Minkyung’s fingers tremble above her phone screen.

Siyeon does not look up from her own device. Kyungwon snores lightly.

 _You’ll know_ , Yaebin’s voice echoes in her head, _one day you’ll know._

Minkyung lets her phone fall to her bed.

* * *

_And it ends, as some things do, without ever beginning._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For J.


	14. How This Ends (2/2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She sits in the dark, her head resting on Minkyung’s shoulders, strands of Minkyung’s hair tickling her cheek in the soft breeze, let's the the sound of the waves fill her ears and she tries her hardest to not think.

  **How This Ends**  
 _2/2  
_ _(Minkyung/Yaebin)_

* * *

_I’ll be over you._

* * *

_December 2016_

 

Yaebin knows she's reached peak denial when she drags Minkyung into a train car and Minkyung looks at her with that exasperated look of fondness and her knees damn near cave.

Minkyung points out the text on their tickets and Yaebin at once wants to hug her and maybe also cry a little bit.

It's dumb, she knows, it's dumb to wish, but Minkyung has always been so observant, why couldn't she just be this little bit more observant when it comes to this?

She drags Minkyung into the train. Out of the train. To the castle. They take selfies in front of the castle. Behind the castle. Under the trees. Yaebin makes Minkyung take photos of them with the setting sun, in front of the setting sun. Yaebin's always been good at taking photos of things, not people, and there's something about having _her_ take pictures of them, of their faces, of their shadows.

They finally sit by the beach after Minkyung makes them go around in search of that one particular kind of soda she saw that one time and to be honest, Yaebin wouldn't care if they got stranded because that would mean they have more time together.

Time together.

She sits in the dark, her head resting on Minkyung’s shoulders, strands of Minkyung’s hair tickling her cheek in the soft breeze, let's the the sound of the waves fill her ears and she tries her hardest to not think.

Minkyung knows everything. Everything. Her hopes, her fears, her thoughts, everything except her feelings and Yaebin is nervous about their debut that it's finally, finally, finally happening and yet it doesn't quite feel real but Minkyung grounds her although she makes her heart race and it's crazy and strange but it's true and Yaebin can't really put it into words but Minkyung does something to her.

She does.

Like a good leader would, the soft voice in Yaebin's head says, and Minkyung is an excellent, excellent leader, she thinks as Minkyung gathers the silence around her and holds Yaebin's beating heart in her hands.

* * *

They miss the train.

Yaebin panics because it was her fault and how is it that she's already managed to screw it up when they haven't even debuted yet and Nayoung-unnie will be disappointed and they haven't even-

Minkyung hugs her and Yaebin feels her heart settle in the cradle of her arms, feels her heart held right there in that one moment in time on a train platform in a small town in Japan in the night as the smallest of flies bustles about the lamp, then crashes and fizzles out.

Yaebin knows Minkyung doesn’t know what she does to her. She knows she doesn’t, knows that  she doesn’t know that the tiniest way she strokes her hands makes Yaebin warm, makes her stomach do flip flops, makes her heart beat, beat, beat in her ears as they sit in a taxi and Yaebin breathes in the scent of old, old leather.

She’ll come back, one day.

When they’re all famous and popular and they’ve done all the things they’ve wanted to do and Yaebin’s stood on all the stages she’s wanted to stand on and all that’s left that she doesn’t have is Minkyung.

She’ll come back then, with her, and tell her everything.

Tell Minkyung that she owns her heart, that she always has and always will, that she calms her and soothes her like no one else does, that Yaebin wouldn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t be who she is today, tomorrow, forever, without her.

Yaebin tells herself that one day, she’ll find the courage to bring Minkyung back here.

And she manages only to tell Minkyung that they’ll be back.

Together, the word sticks in her throat, clings to the surface, and fights its way back to her lips but all she says is “You’ll know.”

She knows Minkyung doesn’t know.

* * *

_Jan 2017_

 

Eunwoo knows.

Yaebin doesn’t have to say a word for Eunwoo to know. Eunwoo just knows. She takes one look at Yaebin and Eunwoo just knows.

Yaebin half expects her to make a jab or something but Eunwoo just tilts her head to one side, thoughtfully, then says nothing.

“No comment?”

Eunwoo shrugs, “It could work.”

Yaebin feels her heart sink.

That’s not what she wants to hear. She wanted to hear Eunwoo say it can never happen, that it is impossible, that she should stop, that it will tear them apart, that it is a terrible idea, that Yaebin is being selfish and silly and dumb.

But Eunwoo looks at her seriously, “It could.”

Yaebin shakes her head, feels her heart betray her in a shaky laugh, “I-Nah, she’s too cool for a person like me.”

Eunwoo blinks up at her, wide-eyed and confused, adoring and baffled and Yaebin knows she must have saved a country in her past life or something because current Yaebin most certainly doesn’t deserve such wonderful friends.

“I mean,” Eunwoo says quietly, “We tease you a lot, but you’re really quite cool, you know.”

“Shut up,” Yaebin says.

Eunwoo hugs her from where she’s seated on a chair, wraps hands around Yaebin’s midriff. Yaebin strokes her hair gently.

“You know,” comes a mumble from her stomach that at once tickles and makes her heart soar, “I really do think you could do it.”

“Shut up Nunu,” Yaebin says.

* * *

_May 2017_

 

“Oh hell no,” Yaebin says, “No, no way. Nope. Nope. Never.”

Eunwoo whines, “but Minkyung-unnie is coming too.”

Yaebin tries not to meet Minkyung’s eyes but ends up caving. Minkyung shrugs, doesn’t push the topic like she never would anyway. She doesn’t know- fine, she knows exactly what Eunwoo is trying to do but Yaebin has standards, goddamnit.

And this, this isn’t what she wants.

She’s told herself this. That this isn’t actually what she wants. That Minkyung isn’t actually what she wants. That what she was looking for was a pillar and stability and the knowledge that it’s all going to be alright.

And they’ve debuted and they’re doing well and Yaebin knows, knows, knows, that she has years left with these girls who will have her back no matter what. And that’s kind of enough. That’s kind of enough, she tells herself. This is enough. Any more would be tempting fate. Any more would be asking for trouble and opening issues she really doesn’t want to open.

She would never be able to forgive herself if she ruined it.

“No. You can go and scare yourselves. I don’t want to.” Yaebin folds her arms.

Eunwoo rolls her eyes, “Alright then, scaredy-cat. Have fun alone at home. In the dark. Alone.”

Yaebin forgets that she’s annoyed at Eunwoo for being so meddling, “Heyyy! That was unnecessary, Eunwoo you meanie!”

Minkyung laughs and Yaebin’s heart rises, then falls.

* * *

_August 2017_

 

“I’m over it,” Yaebin says.

Eunwoo puts her chopsticks down, “you are?”

“Yeah,” Yaebin says, “I am. It’s dumb and it’s not helping and she’s never going to notice and I deserve more than that.”

Eunwoo picks her chopsticks up, picks up some noodles, “What have you been reading now?”

“Hey,” Yaebin says, “is it so hard to believe that I’ve decided that I shouldn’t do this anymore?”

Eunwoo nods her head. Yaebin is usually secretly quite glad that Jieqiong is in China so she doesn’t quite have to share Eunwoo’s attention with anyone. Though moments like this make her rethink that conclusion.

“Well,” Eunwoo says, “I mean, it’s been a long time. Like, a long time.”

“Yeah, so?”

“And like-”

“I’m over it,” Yaebin says, “I am, I am, I am.”

Eunwoo looks like she wants to say that repeating it isn’t going to will it into existence but she just closes her mouth thoughtfully.

“In that case...”

* * *

_September 2017_

 

Yaebin freezes outside her room.

Eunwoo looks sternly at her, _don’t screw this up, Kang Yaebin, you don’t know what I had to do to get this_ , her eyes seem to say.

Yaebin sighs, then pushes the door open.

“Oh hey,” Kyungwon says, “just the person I was looking for. Eunwoo told you?”

“Yeah,” Yaebin fiddles with her fingers.

“Are you sure,” Kyungwon says, “you know what she wants right?”

Yaebin nods, “Yeah.”

“I mean,” Kyungwon says, “not like I think you shouldn’t, because she’s totally cute and it’s up to you if you should, but like, it’s dangerous and risky and-”

Yaebin shrugs, feels a brittle smile come to the surface, “As long as I don’t kiss her, no one’s going to think anything else than two girls meeting up and having a good time, right?”

Kyungwon sighs, “Alright, fine, I’ll give her your number. Good lord, she’s been bothering me for like two weeks already and I’ve been having to find excuses to say I’m too busy.”

Yaebin feels her stomach rise inside her.

Kyungwon looks up from her phone, eyes warm.

“Yaebin,” she says, “You know, right, that we’ll always have your back?”

Yaebin nods, a lump growing in her throat.

“And you know,” Kyungwon says, “That you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, right? Ever?”

Yaebin nods, plasters on a smile, “I know, dummy.”

Kyungwon rolls her eyes, “You’re the dummy, small Kang.”

She ruffles Yaebin’s hair on the way out. Yaebin tries her hardest to not cry as her phone buzzes with a text.

She shouldn’t be sniffling but she wipes at her nose with the back of her hand, types a cheerful

_Hey ;)_

* * *

_November 2017_

 

Yaebin forgets.

It’s silly to say this given how well she remembers so many other things, but Yaebin forgets easily. She lets it go with the slip of a hand, lets it tumble away like a toy, wash into the ocean with a single wave.

She forgets with each spoonful of cake, each lick of ice cream, each kernel of popcorn, each soft laugh shared behind facemasks and ball caps, each nudge, each time a hand winds its way to her side and holds her close in the darkness of the movie theater, every time she is squeezed gently at a jump scare that she most definitely never would have ever, ever watched before.

She forgets, slowly, gradually, fills in the space with bright eyes and warm smiles and late night, early morning, all day, every day texts and they talk, they talk about everything, everything trivial that Yaebin’s ever wanted to talk about.

* * *

_December 2017_

 

_Did you-_

_Hm?_

_Nah, it’s dumb._

_Nothing’s dumb when you say it._

_You’re so cheesy, Kang Yaebin._

_And you love it, but what were you gonna say?_

_Did you ever, surely you must have, I mean, like a girl like you can’t- it’s stupid but-_

_It’s not stupid._

_But I’m not the first you’ve ever loved, am I?_

Yaebin stops.

_Hey_

_Hm?_

_You want to go to Japan with me? In December? I want to show you a place._

_Sure. I’d go anywhere with you, Yaebin. You know that._

_Heh._

Yaebin’s hands shake.

* * *

It’s not right, Yaebin can’t help but think as they sit at the train platform and wait for the very last train to pull up.

They’d spent all day looking out at the sea, pointing out the seagulls and squinting over at the distant shore of another one of the islands, counting ships that slowly steam by, breathing in the depths of the sea, resting their heads together.

Yaebin cannot hear the beating of her own heart, only feels the mild pulse in her fingers, knows that she holds another’s heart in her hands but has nothing to share.

They don’t talk after.

* * *

_January 2018_

 

“Where did you go?”

Yaebin stops, looks back into the practice room. It is empty but for Minkyung.

“Go?”

Minkyung looks at her, this time with a fierce intensity that makes Yaebin lick her drying lips without noticing, makes her heart pound, makes her come alive in a way that she thought she had long forgotten.

“Yeah,” Minkyung says, “Where did you go, Kang Yaebin?”

* * *

_I believe._


	15. the long and the short and well, us.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the long and the short and well, us the 98ers. A study in three. 

 the long and the short and well, us.  
_(the 98ers feat. light Eunwoo/Jieqiong)_

* * *

1.

It is the 15th of December and her stomach rumbles and Jieqiong kind of regrets not sneaking the snacks from the plane into her pockets. Sure, the meetings had somehow managed to end early so they had gotten some food but this would be about the time when she would be nibbling on something or other in the dorm, whether that be the sweets Sungyeon keeps stashed away, or the snacks that Yaebin guards ferociously but shares easily.

She debates not moving, wiggles a finger as she stares up at the hotel room ceiling from where she is lying on the bed. She is not yet in pajamas so she will have to get up eventually. Eventually, she thinks. Not now. Now she can just-

Her stomach rumbles again.

Jieqiong sits up with a huff and shuffles toward the minibar. Surely they would forgive her? Or perhaps she could go downstairs to the convenience store across the street. Or text Xiao and beg her for food. Something. She doubts Xiao would have food. They are idols, after all.

She accidentally kicks her luggage on the floor, pouts though there is no one to see and pat her on the head. The contents shift a little, exposing a corner of something silver. Hm. Jieqiong prods at it with a manicured finger.

It gives way a little.

Hm.

She scoops the socks aside and cannot decide if she is going to strangle or hug Kang Yaebin the next time she sees her. Or whoever snuck this into her luggage, since it might not actually have been Kang Yaebin. She should be kinder to their shortest member but it really was most likely Kang Yaebin since they had discussed curry at lunch and Jieqiong had very clearly said that she was very much done with 3 minute curry.

The pack of 3 minute curry stares innocently back at her.

Jieqiong supposes that Yaebin was at least thoughtful enough to make sure that a pack of instant rice was also snuck in.

Well, good thing she had not yet changed into pajamas.

\---

Jieqiong does a little shuffle while waiting for the microwave to be done. Or well, while waiting for her food to be done before any of the managers of any of the artists find her. She knows her manager is on a different floor but is not sure that Xiao’s will not tell on her. Technically she is not on a diet, so food is sort of fair game.

(Yes, it is likely that she will be a little rounder tomorrow because of how late it is, but the actual press conference is not till the 17th so there is still time.)

Ding goes the microwave and rumble rumble goes the ice machine and Jieqiong tries not to jump at the sounds. She would open up the pack here and pour the curry onto the rice so it is easier to dispose of the evidence but then the smell might linger so she just stacks them and takes an extremely uneasy elevator ride back to her floor.

It has been such a long time since she has snuck out like this and actually done something she probably should not do by herself. Usually Siyeon comes with her, or Nunu joins in or she somehow persuades Yewon that it’s not a terrible idea and the bunch of them end up doing silly things. She almost misses her partners in crime though they’ve literally been apart for less than twenty four hours.

No stirring from the manager's room - she doesn't quite blame them, they know that her best (worst) plans involve multiple people and just her alone in China isn't quite enough. (Again, yes, Xiao is here but she is probably asleep. Jieqiong would be if she were her.)

She tears the packet open, pours the curry over the rice, watches the liquid seep between the grains, sees the potato chunks tumble down to the edge of the plastic tray, bites back a sigh. Smells trigger memories and the one this one triggers is not Jieqiong’s fondest, not right now.

She finds a spoon wrapped in a piece of scrap paper.

_Yo, Happy Birthday Kyulkyung-ie._

_You really shouldn’t be eating in your hotel room at night but you always get hungry so tada. I’m awesome, right?_

She snorts. Thoughtful annoying Kang Yaebin.

_Wasn’t sure if there’s a microwave in your room but Nayoung-unnie says there are always microwaves in hotels so you’ll just have to make it work somehow. You’re a smart kid even though you’re really dumb sometimes so you’ll figure it out. (p.s. Just call the lobby. I know you knew that, but just in case you’ve decided to not use your brain)_

_Anyway, it’s a pity we can’t spend your birthday together (Nayoung-unnie made me write this part since she’s the one that bought the rice which I didn’t think about so I owe her one) but eat this and think of us, ok? We’ll be thinking of you. Or something. I’ll probably be sleeping._

_But yes._

_Don’t freeze._

_Don’t die._

_Come back in one piece._

_Don’t replace Eunwoo with Cheng Xiao or she’ll be sad._

_Happy birthday, dumbass._

_Cheers,_ _  
_ _Your other favorite 98-liner, Yaebin_

_p.s. Or just don’t tell her._

Jieqiong snorts.

The curry is delicious.

* * *

2.

“I’ve been replaced,” Eunwoo mumbles into her cereal.

Yaebin raises an eyebrow.

“By?”

“By a cat. And Cheng Xiao.”

“Oh,” Yaebin digs a spoon into Xiyeon’s tumbler and scoops out another spoonful of green semi-solid substance, “you’re talking about the least useful member of Junure who’s now gallivanting around Thailand with her other BFF that isn’t you.”

Eunwoo droops. Physically droops.

Kyungwon looks up from her phone, “Do you always have to be quite this straightforward, Yaebin?”

Yaebin shrugs, “Well, it’s true.”

“I know it’s true,” Kyungwon says as Eunwoo groans and puts her head in her hands, jerks a finger in Eunwoo’s direction, “but I think she already knew that.”

“You know,” Minkyung says from where she is rummaging for some other kind of cereal, “You could just text her. Like, I’m surprised she hasn’t sent us pictures of-”

Their phones chime. Well, Eunwoo’s chimes. Yaebin’s buzzes.

Yaebin rolls her eyes as Eunwoo practically leaps up and grabs her phone.

“Vegetables,” says Eunwoo, waving the phone in the air, “She sent a picture of vegetables on a plate to the group chat. What did you do to her, Yaebin?”

Yaebin holds her spoon up in defence, looks around the room for support but finds none. Kyungwon has returned to her phone. Minkyung is looking everywhere else but at her. Traitor.

“Fine. I’m just going to go to the gym if you don’t appreciate me here, bye!”

“Wash the tumbler,” Minkyung says, reaching back and grabbing hold of the back of her shirt.

Yaebin pouts, “Yes mom.”

Eunwoo groans as she locks her phone and puts it back face down on the table. Yaebin scrubs the mouth of the tumbler with a soapy sponge.

“And it’s another picture of the cat. She’s in Thailand, away from the cat and all we get are pictures that her friend sends her of the cat.”

Yaebin shrugs, wants to scratch her nose because it is itchy but her hands are soapy. She settles for rubbing it with her forearm.

“You know,” Minkyung says, “You could just ask her to bring the cat over and you can have a duel and the winner gets Kyulkyung. Then it’d be settled forever. Easy peasy. You’d win because the cat is small.”

Eunwoo’s eyes light up and her fingers fly across the phone screen. Minkyung pales. Yaebin puts the now clean tumbler back on the shelf. Wow, Nunu sure types fast.

“Kyungwon,” Minkyung says, “Kyungwon, tell her I was joking. Hurry up.”

Kyungwon sighs, “Minkyung was joking. Don’t do that. Sungyeon is allergic to-”

Yaebin looks down at her phone as it chimes.

_Nunu-yah, you’re so silly but ok if Minkyung-unnie said so! I’ll bring Lulu back with me when I come back! Love you all! Thailand is awesome, this vegetable is literally the best thing I have ever had in my life. Gotta go, we’re going shopping, bye!_

Eunwoo looks up from her phone with a look of determination. Kyungwon sighs. Minkyung looks like she wants to strangle something or, more accurately, some two people. Yaebin decides she should escape before she is grouped into the same category as dumb and dumber.

The door to their room opens and a sleepy-looking Nayoung-unnie comes out of the door.

“Morning,” Yaebin says.

“Mm,” says Nayoung as she shuffles out, phone in her hand.

Their phones both buzz.

Yaebin reads the message then looks up at Nayoung who now looks very awake.

Uh oh, Yaebin thinks.

\---

“Eunwoo has been watching cat videos on YouTube,” is the first thing that Jieqiong hears when she enters the dorm. Jieqiong raises her eyebrows, gently lowering the first cat carrier onto the floor. Scratching sounds ensue. She puts the second one down. More scratching sounds ensue.

“I- Kang Yaebin!”

“It’s true,” Yaebin says, “She’s been watching cat videos because she doesn’t know how to take care of cats and she wanted to learn because-”

“S-Stop,” Eunwoo whines, “It’s embarrassing!”

“It’s ridiculously cute, that’s what it is,” Minkyung says from the doorway to the kitchen, “hey, welcome back.”

Jieqiong beams at her.

“Wait,” Yaebin says, “Is that… two cats?”

“Two. Cats.”

“H-Hi, Sungyeon,” Jieqiong tries her hardest to not flinch, looks about as sheepish as she can manage, “it’s nice to see you too.”

“Two. Cats. Unnie. You-”

“I know I’m sorry but my friend is going to China for a bit and Xuanyi’s busy right now with promotions so their dorm is empty for most of the day so we can’t really leave the cats there unattended and so I thought I’d just bring them back and maybe lock them in the other room or something I promise it’s only going to be for a while before I find another place for them I swear I still love you Sungyeon-ah.”

“Wow,” Yaebin says, “It’s been such a long time since we’ve seen you like, awake but wow, I guess you actually really don’t punctuate in real life either huh.”

Jieqiong whacks her on the shoulder, “I do punctuate!”

Sungyeon rolls her eyes and sighs, “Fine. Just make sure you change out to a different set of clothes before you come back in to sleep.”

“I love you too,” Jieqiong says.

Eunwoo pouts.

“And you, silly.”

Scratching sounds.

“Ok, ok,” Jieqiong sighs, “I guess everyone’s really impatient today. C’mon, Nunu. Let’s introduce you to Juju and Lulu.”

Eunwoo beams.

“Wait,” Yaebin says, “her cat’s called Juju?”

Eunwoo frowns. Jieqiong sighs, throws her hands up in the air.

Yaebin laughs.

* * *

3.

“I don’t like it,” Eunwoo says quietly, heart pounding.

Jieqiong looks up at her tone, puts her phone down, scoots closer, “Hm?”

“I don’t,” Eunwoo says, does not look at her, pats Lulu’s head gently, “It’s stupid and it’s selfish but I don’t like it.”

Jieqiong runs her fingers through Eunwoo’s hair. The gentle touch soothes her and makes her almost want to stop talking but Yaebin’s determined face swims into her mind’s eye again, complete with the imagined audio of Yaebin sighing.

“I’ve tried liking it or being happy for you but I just, I miss you when you’re gone,” Eunwoo says, wrings her hands. Lulu looks back at her.

Jieqiong’s hands slow.

“It feels like I’m losing you,” Eunwoo says, “again. But this time I don’t know if you’ll come back.”

“But I will,” Jieqiong says, “I always do.”

“I know,” Eunwoo mumbles, “but it doesn’t feel like it. Like with IOI it still felt like I could follow you, you know? Like that with PRISTIN, we’d do the things you’d done, but this time we’d do them together. Again for you, but together this time.”

Jieqiong picks her hands up in hers.

“But with this,” Euwoo says, “I can’t. I know it’s dumb but I can’t follow you there and it just feels like you’re going places I can’t follow, it feels like you’re going away and never coming back and even though you come back it feels like it won’t be the same and I know it’s silly and dumb because you’re right here and you’re the same, you’re listening to me being silly and-”

Jieqiong rests her head on Eunwoo’s shoulder and Eunwoo stops for a moment, takes in a shaky breath.

“And I just feel so small right here because I’m just making it worse, right? I’m just making it harder and I’m not helping and that’s not what I’m supposed to be doing because I’m your friend and friends -”

“You’re not just a friend, Nunu,” Jieqiong says quietly, “You’re my best friend.”

“And best friends don’t do things like this,” Eunwoo mutters mournfully, “I’m sorry. I knew this wasn’t going to help and I shouldn’t have.”

“No,” Jieqiong says, gently strokes Eunwoo’s hand, “No, I didn’t know you were feeling this way. I’m sorry. I’m not going anywhere. I’m really not.”

“You’re flying back to China tomorrow,” Eunwoo says. _You’re leaving me again._

“But I’ll be right back,” Jieqiong says, “I’ll always come back.”

Eunwoo’s voice sounds soft and small, even to herself, “Promise?”

Jieqiong holds her for a moment. The silence eats away at Eunwoo until she cannot bear it anymore. Promise, why should she try to make Jieqiong promise? It’s silly and it’s not something friends-

“Pinky promise,” Jieqiong giggles, looks up, bats her eyelashes, laughs at her with that one scrunch of a smile that takes her breath away.

Eunwoo wants to laugh and cry at the same time so she does. 


	16. my hearts(tr)ings

“Uh,” says Eunwoo’s new roommate, “it’s like 1am. Where are you going?”

Eunwoo grins sheepishly, ducks her head, “I just kinda want to check out the practice room facilities?”

Kang Yaebin rolls around on her bed, “Ok, text me when you reach there. Call me if you get lost.”

Eunwoo pouts, “We’re both freshmen. How will texting you help?”

Yaebin shrugs, “I can’t help but I’ll call a friend who can. Or the police. Or something.”

“I won’t need the police!”

Yaebin sticks out her tongue. Eunwoo flips her hair. They both laugh, Yaebin flaps a hand at Eunwoo but gets up from her bed and shuffles over to the door anyway, to lock it behind her. 

As Eunwoo gathers her coat around her, she thinks that she must definitely have won the roommate lottery or something. Going to university, leaving her friends behind, staying away from home for the first time is all pretty damn nerve-wracking but at least Kang Yaebin from not-too-far-away seems like a nice person. Even if she keeps offering her health food. Eunwoo supposes that's what nice people do.

Her breath puffs up in the cold air, she feels the tip of her nose losing that tiniest bit of feeling like it always does in the winter. The music practice rooms are not that far from the dorm, or so it seemed like it on the map, but people somehow like to draw campus maps without pointing out important things like hills.

Hills.

Eunwoo does not like hills. Her middle school had had a big-ass hill in front of it and she had thought she was done slip-sliding up and down hills but no, no one told her that the music department here was up on the top of the hill. And now she is enrolled and her roommate is nice and it is too late to quit and give up, not that she really would have, but anyway it’s cold and it’s 1am and to be entirely honest, Eunwoo is really, really, really nervous.

Like she knows she made it in fine, but part of her is just worried, like, maybe that they’ll wake up and put a note under the door and say that Yaebin can stay but they made a mistake and Jung Eunwoo needs to go home.

She shakes the thoughts out of her head. No. Gotta be positive. Think positive. You can do it, Eunwoo. You know you can. The semester has not started yet, there’s still time to get used to the environment and be comfortable and her hands close over the door to the music building.

The door doesn’t budge even when she pushes it.

Uhm.

Oh. Right. Swipe cards. Eunwoo fumbles in her wallet for her card - it’s got to be somewhere in here, she got it literally just this morning, can't have lost it already - when a slim pair of fingers taps a card to her right and then opens the door.

“Oh,” Eunwoo mumbles, looks up from her wallet.

Eunwoo does not watch many dramas but she swears this has got to be one of those random cinematic moments. She looks up, stares into sharp features, wire-rimmed black glasses, a small smile and kind, gorgeous eyes. There’s no snow falling and there’s barely a breeze but holy moly there’s something about this fraction of a second that has Eunwoo stunned. This person's nose must have been made by angels… Good lord Eunwoo what are you thinking? 

The other girl just smiles at her and gestures for her to enter.

“Thanks,” Eunwoo squeaks.

The girl’s smile broadens. 

Eunwoo’s heart does a thing at that, then the wind blows and Eunwoo realizes she’s supposed to be going inside and shuffles into the building. The girl nods at her as she passes, heads down the corridor, large instrument case on her back and Eunwoo manages the tiniest, most awkward of smiles.

The girl turns a corner and heads out of sight and clunk goes Eunwoo’s forehead against the information panel on the wall.

Pull. It. Together. Jung. Eun. Woo.

Eunwoo takes in a deep breath. Right. She’s here to practice.

Practice. Now, the practice rooms… 

Eunwoo sighs, shoves her hands into her pockets and trudges over towards the stairs.

* * *

Eunwoo finally squeaks the last door open in basement two, flips the switch to turn on the light. A broken piano (there’s a sign) in a corner and a dented music stand. She thinks about the tuition for a grand total of five seconds then closes the door behind her. The stuff is definitely a little older and mustier than even her high school practice room and the equipment more tattered. 

Doesn’t matter, though, because Eunwoo sings.

She shrugs off her jacket, unwraps her scarf, puts it in a barely-toppling-over pile on top of her stuff, digs through her phone for the instrumentals. She should warm up. That’s the proper way, but eh, this is just for her, just for her own sense of security, for her own knowledge that things are going to be just fine.

The first few notes fill her earbuds, Eunwoo closes her eyes, imagines for a moment that she is far away. 

She imagines the bright spot light flickering on, the curtains rising, imagines waves rising, falling, crashing along a seashore, lets the music take her and soars.

Eunwoo sings.

* * *

Eunwoo’s phone rings and stops playing Because of a Man.

“Uh,” says a vaguely familiar voice, “are you alive?”

“Uhm,” says Eunwoo, “Who’s this?”

“Yaebin,” says Yaebin.

“Oh,” says Eunwoo, “right.”

“I guess you’re alive. Ok. I’ll hang up now. I’m going to sleep. Don’t die walking down the hill. Bye.”

“Bye,” says Eunwoo as Yaebin hangs up.

She should probably go back to her room. It is probably pretty late and while there's nothing on tomorrow besides orientation, that's usually not something to be caught sleeping in. Maybe. That and she feels like she can finally breathe, that her heart and stomach have settled in their correct, original positions, that she can do what she's here to do.

Eunwoo gathers her things, shuffles out the door, takes a few steps and pauses as the muffled sound of some plucked instrument comes drifting out of the adjacent door.

She knows she shouldn't, because it's late and well, she really just shouldn't go about literally poking her nose in other people's business but she's just so curious.

There's something not quite like a guitar to the sound, something different and Eunwoo the musician's interest has been piqued. She shuffles quietly closer to the door, closer to the small window.

Oh dear heavens above it's her.

It's that girl.

The door girl. The door finger card helper girl person angel thing.

Eunwoo has clearly lost her ability to think in full sentences as she stares through the window at the look of concentration on the girl's face, as she takes in the way her arms tense but move so fluidly, at the sounds that are coaxed out of that gorgeous gorgeous instrument.

Eunwoo sighs, then loses her balance and collides face first with the glass.

Their eyes meet, the music stops as the girl almost drops her instrument to the floor but catches it in time.

Eunwoo stands there, frozen to the ground as the girl starts stalking towards the door, face dangerously blank.

Run, says Eunwoo's brain. 

No, say Eunwoo's feet. 

“Uhm,” says Eunwoo, as the door opens.

“Come in,” says the girl, “don't stand outside like that. You startled me. And it's cold.”

“Uhm,” says Eunwoo, gathers the most basic of her wits about her, “I really shouldn't be bothering you, I'll just go.”

An impish grin comes to the girl's face. Eunwoo thinks she's going to die - no one should be allowed to smile like this with a face like that, “you owe me one. Sit down.”

No one's ever accused Eunwoo of having too much of a spine so she sits obediently. On the floor. 

The girl's grin widens, “I meant on the chair over there silly, not right here.”

“O-Oh,” says the only functioning five percent of Eunwoo’s brain. She tries to get up. It doesn't really work. Et tu, feet. 

The girl laughs, leans over, holds out a hand to help her up.

“Jieqiong.”

“Eun-Eunwoo.”

Jieqiong smiles as she pulls Eunwoo to her feet, “It's nice to meet you, Eunwoo.”

Eunwoo melts, Jieqiong laughs and it is a sound that Eunwoo thinks she may never ever be sick of. 

And then she trips over her own feet and falls onto Jieqiong and the instrument and the subsequent “Eunwoo-oo-oo-oo-ooooooo!!” basically defines their relationship from there on out. 


	17. sending...

 

 

sending...  
_Yaebin, Jieqiong_

* * *

There's a bug in my room. Come get it.  
  
_sending._ _  
__pending._  
delivered.

_Read._

 

What kind of bug?

_Read._

 

Like idk. A big flying thing. Just come over and get it.

_sending._ _  
__pending._  
delivered.

 

_Read._

 

Yaebin, I'm in Shanghai.

_Read._

 

Oh.

_sending._ _  
__pending._  
delivered.

_Read._

 

Then what are we supposed to do?

_sending._ _  
__pending._  
delivered.

_Read._

 

Uhm.  
_Read._

 

_Typing…_

 

Ask your mom?  
_Read._

 

My mom's gone home.

_sending._ _  
__pending._  
delivered.

_Read._

 

When are you coming back anyway? I can sleep in the big room.

_sending._ _  
__pending._  
delivered.

_Read._

 

Yaebin, you're gonna want to find another solution.

_Read._

 

...why?

_sending._ _  
__pending._ _  
_ delivered.


	18. Chapter 18

Sound Out (we are Pristin)

_Jieqiong, Nayoung_

* * *

“Hey,” says Jieqiong, “I know it's gonna sound weird but can you just talk to me about anything right now?”

“Talk?”

“Yeah. About anything.”

Nayoung frowns slightly but Jieqiong just looks at her with that set of furrowed brows like she's thinking and to be honest, Nayoung's missed her enough to not really care. She didn't think she would.

Not that she wouldn't miss her, but she hadn't thought that she'd miss how much… sound Jieqiong just made in general, whether by being herself or being around the other crazy loud tiger cubs.

“Well,” Nayoung starts, “Yaebin first did a thing to her hand and we honestly don't even really know how she did it…”

Jieqiong's smile is small but content as she leans her head on Nayoung's shoulder.

“And it was so last minute that we couldn't dig Kyungwon out from Gwangju on like a single day's notice so she attended with a bandage around her hand and slept all day inside.”

Jieqiong would usually laugh here or say something but today she just hums lightly and it throws Nayoung off a little.

“Minkyung tried hard to not worry but you know how she's like.”

Jieqiong hums again.

“And I don't know if you saw but my routine was a disaster.”

Jieqiong looks up at her, the weight of her head coming off of Nayoung's shoulders. Nayoung shrugs, “It really sucked but I can't do anything about it anymore. You'll get to see it when it airs.”

“Yewon showed me,” comes the soft whisper, “it wasn’t a disaster. You looked amazing.”

“Couldn't throw the damn stick though.”

Jieqiong shrugs, “you didn't hurt yourself.”

Nayoung sighs.

“And you?”

Jieqiong looks up at her.

“I'm… I'm good.”

“...no, you're not.”

Jieqiong opens her mouth, then shuts it, “I- I'm just tired.”

“You've been really busy.”

“...yeah.”

“That kind of schedule is pretty tough - did you sleep?”

Jieqiong rests her head back on Nayoung's shoulder, “I got a few hours? Then some in the plane.”

Nayoung hums, pauses.

“You know you can message me anytime, for anything, right?”

“H-Huh?”

Nayoung's eyes soften.

“You can message me anytime for anything. When you're there and you're busy and you're stressed or you're frustrated or,” she smiles, “if the dressing room is too quiet and no one laughs at your jokes. I made a WeChat. I think that's what it's called.”

“You never laugh at my jokes anyway,” Jieqiong pouts but her eyes are smiling.

“I'll try. Just for you.”

“Hmph, I'm funny. You just don't get it.”

“I do get it, I just choose not to laugh.”

Jieqiong's jaw drops, “you're so mean!”

Nayoung smiles.

“I missed you too, silly.”

Nayoung hears Jieqiong's breath catch, feels fingers draw circles on her shoulder.

“...I missed you guys too. It… It really is too quiet. It's kinda weird. I don't know how to say it. There isn't a good way to say it. I wish you were there. I-”

Nayoung just holds her.

Jieqiong swallows, “I- Like I feel bad for feeling bad you know?”

Nayoung hums. She knows why Jieqiong hasn't texted, knows why there haven't been any messages and very few photos and heck even very few clips of anything even when they recorded the song in Korea.

“It's not on you. It never was. We all know that.”

“Yeah but I'm the only-”

Jieqiong's mouth closes again. Nayoung nudges her gently, “keep going.”

“But I just don't feel like I have the right to be unhappy cos it's so like ungrateful right? To have the chance and not like be totally happy about it-”

“Fuck that,” Nayoung says.

Jieqiong's eyes widen, “You just swore. You don't usually swear.”

Nayoung shrugs, “And you got quiet. You don't usually do quiet.”

“I do- fine.”

“We're still a team, you know,” Nayoung says, “and I'm still here for you, if you need me to be. And I can only guess how hard it's been.”

“I know,” Jieqiong says, “I know you're here.”

“You're never a burden.”

Jieqiong's intake of breath is sharp.

“You won't be bothering me. It's OK.”

Jieqiong buries her head in Nayoung's shoulder.

If Nayoung feels the trembles and the moisture, she says nothing about it, just gently pats Jieqiong's head.

“You’re one of us,” she says finally.

 

* * *

Additional scene:

 

“You're our youngest, dumbest tiger cub. Of course you're one of us.”

“...dumbest?”

“Yup.”

“You sure?”

“Yup. You didn't text cos you thought we'd be hurt and so you just hurt by yourself - now if that isn't the stupidest thing you 98s have done in a few months, I don't know what it is.”

“Even dumber than whatever Yaebin did to her hand?”

“Probably? And her hand's better now anyway.”

“And I'll text so much you'll be sick of me so I'm all better now.”

“Is there nothing you three will not compete about?”

“Uhm.”

“I'll take that as a yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> will I ever stop writing about Jieqiong in China? maybe one day...


End file.
